As described in this film, those who have followed the 2000 US presidential election must have left a deep impression on the Electoral College system. In the general election, the Democratic candidate Gore, who won a relatively large majority of the popular vote nationwide, eventually lost to Republican candidate Bush Jr. due to a shortage of electoral votes. Faced with this seemingly contradictory conclusion, you may have questions about the process of the US election: under the current election rules, what is the minimum number of votes a candidate needs to get to be successfully elected as the President of the United States?
Before answering this question, it is clear that some understanding of the Electoral College system adopted in the US presidential election is required. Currently, there are 538 electoral votes in the United States. Among them, the 50 states in the United States have a total of 535 electoral votes. The number of electors in each state is equal to the sum of the number of senators and representatives in the federal Congress. The number of senators in each state is 2, and The specific number of representatives depends on the population of each state and will be adjusted according to the situation, with a minimum of one and a maximum of 53 in California. That is to say, among the 50 states in the United States, the number of electoral votes varies widely among states, including Alaska, Montana, Delaware and other 7 states with smaller populations that have 2 Senate seats and 1 House of Representatives, so each gets 3 electoral votes, while California, the most populous state, is allocated a total of 55 electoral votes. The 23rd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, passed in 1961, also allocated three electoral votes to the capital, Washington, D.C., so the total number of U.S. presidential electors is now 538.
The specific issue of attribution of electoral votes can be determined by each state. Among the states in the United States, only Maine, which has 4 electoral votes, and Nebraska, which has 5 electoral votes, allocate electoral votes according to the outcome of the electoral districts within their states. Other states and Washington, D.C. adopt a "winner-take-all" system, which means that as long as any candidate has the most popular votes in that state, that is, a relative majority, he can win all the electoral votes in that state.
According to the Constitution, any candidate nationwide only needs to obtain more than half of the electoral votes, which is at least 270 electoral votes according to the current situation, to be elected president of the United States. If none of the candidates receive more than half of the electoral votes, there will be no second round of elections nationwide, but the U.S. House of Representatives will vote among the top three candidates with the most votes.
The U.S. Constitution has always been proud of Americans, but the Electoral College system stipulated in it has long been criticized by all parties. In fact, this institutional arrangement was the product of a compromise at the beginning of its creation. In order to obtain the support of a sufficient number of states for the Constitution, the Constitution formulated this rule for the so-called protection of the interests of small states. With the passage of time, the contradiction between the Electoral College system and democracy has become more and more prominent, and the belief that people have always believed that "the one who wins the most votes wins" has also suffered repeated blows.
If someone told you that the minimum number of votes needed to become the President of the United States is 0 votes, you might be surprised. In fact, this scene did happen in history. In the 1972 U.S. presidential election, Nixon, the Republican candidate, was successfully re-elected. At that time, his running mate, the vice president of the United States who took office through this election, was Agnew. Less than a year after taking office, in late 1973, Agnew had to resign over a corruption scandal, and Nixon named Gerald Ford as vice president. Clinker Because of the Watergate scandal, Nixon disgracefully stepped down on August 9, 1974. According to the constitution, Vice President Ford succeeded the presidency, becoming the first in history, and so far the only one who took office without any election. The President of the United States.
Such "small-probability events" may not always happen, and the vast majority of US presidents are ultimately elected through national elections. In theory, how many popular votes do you need to obtain to become the President of the United States through general elections?
If you get into the nitty-gritty, the answer to this question in extreme cases is: 1. Assuming that there are three groups of candidates A, B, and C participating in the presidential election in the United States, candidate A has won 1 popular vote in a certain state, and under this extreme condition, only this 1 voter in the state has participated in the general election. voted, so all the electoral votes in the state went to A, but he did not receive any popular votes in other states in the United States; while candidates B and C were evenly matched in other states, and no group of candidates reached 270 elections The threshold of votes, according to the constitution, ultimately has to be voted by the members of Congress to elect the president. If the final vote of the House of Representatives is that A is elected, then candidate A, who received only 1 vote in total in the general election, can be elected as the President of the United States.
Do not think that the United States Congress has not participated in the presidential election. In 1824, John Quincy Adams was elected by the House of Representatives in a general election without an absolute majority of the electoral votes. Of course, his popular vote is much higher than 1, and the extreme case mentioned earlier contains too many situations that are impossible in reality: an important problem is that although the US presidential election turnout continues It goes down, but there is a "prosperous scene" in which only one person votes in a certain state, and I am afraid that it will not appear at all in reality. Another most critical issue is that although third-party parties in the United States, including the Green Party, have also won a considerable number of popular votes in recent elections, in addition to the Democratic and Republican A relative majority, or even a certain percentage of the popular vote in Maine or Nebraska to gain electoral votes, is an almost impossible task. Judging from the current trend, the US presidential election is, to a large extent, just a contest between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.
Regarding voter turnout statistics and the division of parties, I am afraid they are very tedious and complicated tasks. In order to simplify the discussion, let us make a few assumptions for the time being: every state in the United States adopts a "winner-takes-all" strategy; there are only two groups of candidates participating in the general election; every citizen of the United States is eligible to vote, and in the presidential election In the election, you must express your opinion and choose one of the two groups of candidates. Under such a hypothetical scenario of 100% voter turnout and only two groups of valid candidates running for election, what is the minimum number of people who will be elected to be the US president?
To answer this question, a phenomenon that needs to be clearly studied is that the number of people represented by each electoral vote in each state is different. As mentioned earlier, the number of electoral votes in each state is equal to the sum of the number of senators and representatives in the federal Congress, where the number of senators is fixed at 2 per state, and the number of representatives is generally based on the state. The population is distributed, but the actual correspondence between the population of each state and the number of representatives is not exactly the same. A problem arising from this is that the number of people represented by each electoral vote in each state is different. . Generally speaking, in states with smaller populations, each electoral vote represents a relatively small number of people; in states with larger populations, each electoral vote represents a relatively large number of people. According to 2007 U.S. population projections, the two extreme states are Wyoming and Texas: in Wyoming, there is one electoral vote for every 174,277 people; in Texas, every 700,000 electoral votes 3070 talents are allocated 1 electoral vote. Rough analogies are imprecise, but to some extent, individual voter votes in Wyoming may have four times as much impact on the final election as voters in Texas.
For candidates, this information is valuable because getting a certain amount of voter support in a small state is far more important to the end result than an equal amount in a large state. In the actual situation of the two-party system, for two groups of candidates A and B, if A in some small states (that is, states with a smaller population corresponding to each electoral vote) each receive 1 popular vote. Even a negligible margin wins and takes all the electoral votes in those states, while B wins all the remaining states, taking all the popular votes. In this case, A is likely to be in a sufficient number of states (e.g. one possible combination is: Wyoming, Washington, D.C., Vermont, North Dakota, Alaska, Rhode Island, Hawaii, New Hampshire States, Maine, Nebraska, West Virginia, Idaho, Iowa, New Mexico, Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Connecticut, Nevada , Alabama, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Utah, Kentucky, Missouri, Oregon, Massachusetts, Colorado, South Carolina, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Maryland, Ohio, Indiana State, New Jersey, Washington, 37 states that make up less than 44 percent of the U.S. population) narrowly won, winning exactly 270 electoral votes, while none in the other states. Candidate A can successfully become the President of the United States at this time, even if he actually received less than 22% of the popular vote.
Of course, such a scenario is only hypothetical. The Democratic Party and the Republican Party have their own basic bases across the country, and voters in many states have relatively clear preferences, so it is not realistic to count each state indiscriminately for random combinations. By the way, if there is any practical implication of the assumption in the above paragraph, it shows that the Electoral College system is in fact an institutional arrangement that is beneficial to the American Republican Party. Because most of the small states support Republican candidates in the general election, it is relatively less difficult for the Republicans to obtain a sufficient number of electoral votes because of the existence of these states. In subsequent historical materials, we can find that, with the exception of the 1824 election, where the two-party structure had not yet been formed, every electoral controversy stemmed from the fact that the Republican Party was at a disadvantage in the popular vote, but was able to win the electoral vote. lead.
Judging from the data, although the proportion of the popular votes of the elected candidates in the presidential election may not always reach an absolute majority (that is, the popular vote ratio exceeds 50%, in the past 55 US presidential elections, a total of 17 times the president has not won Elected with an absolute majority of the popular vote), but at least a relative majority constitutes an overwhelming majority. However, in history, there have been 4 incidents of successful election under the Electoral College system without obtaining a relative majority in the popular vote (that is to say, the number of popular votes is less than that of one other candidate).
The earliest was the 1824 election mentioned earlier, in which a total of 4 candidates won the electoral votes, and John Quincy Adams was elected with a majority in the second election to the House of Representatives, but he was elected in the original election. With only 84 electoral votes, the popular vote was a measly 30.9%. Andrew Jackson, who was ahead in the first round of elections, was defeated in the House of Representatives election, although he won the most 99 electoral votes and 41.3% of the popular vote.
The other was the 1888 election, when Republican candidate Benjamin Harrison won 233 electoral votes, with 47.8 percent of the popular vote. Losing Democrat Stephen Grove Cleveland received 168 electoral votes, but he won 48.6 percent of the popular vote.
The most recent was the controversial 2000 election, in which Gore, a Democrat, lost 48.38 percent of the popular vote to Bush Jr., who won 47.87 percent of the popular vote. After six weeks of back-and-forth on Florida's recount, the two electoral votes were 266 for Gore and 271 for Bush (an elector in Washington, D.C. abstained in protest, so this election The actual electoral votes are 537).
And the most unjust victim of the Electoral College system in history is Democrat Samuel Tilden. He won an absolute majority of 51.0 percent of the popular vote in the 1876 U.S. presidential election, but lost the electoral vote 184 to 185 to Republican Luther Hay, who had more than 250,000 fewer popular votes than him. s. The bipartisan feud over the outcome of this election even delayed Hayes' swearing-in by more than a month until Congress finally made a ruling 56 hours before his inauguration. Congress resolved the issue peacefully, but the undemocratic flaws inherent in the Electoral College system remained.
How many votes does the President of the United States need to be elected? It seems that this problem is not as simple as people think. From the extreme case of taking office without running for office, to the theoretical possibility of getting elected with only 1 vote, to the hypothetical scenario of winning with about 22% of the popular vote, these results are the same as people have always believed. There's a huge difference in "the one with the most votes wins." Even from the perspective of historical data, the Electoral College system has produced the result of "the one with the fewest votes being elected" four times. In the book "How Democratic is the American Constitution? | Democratic Criticism of the American Constitution", American political scientist Dahl analyzed and thought about the background, limitations and reform possibilities of the Electoral College system. And the solution to the dilemma is undoubtedly very helpful.
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