Tuesday, August 31, 2004

Splitting Electoral Votes: A Historical Perspective

The RMN ran an update to an earlier story about the effects of electoral vote splitting on past elections.

In summary, the RMN concludes that the elections in 1948, 1968, 1992, and 2000 would have resulted in no candidate getting enough electoral votes and the election being sent to the House of Representatives to decide. It concludes:

Four postwar elections chosen by the House of Representatives rather than by the people! Surely Coloradans will see through this anti-democratic amendment and reject it.

I don't know the method they used (the article refers to the WSJ for the analysis), but as I posted here, other analysis shows that Bush would have won the 2000 election handily when applying the split vote system to all 50 states.

What would have happened had the split vote system been applied everywhere is not really the point. What is important is that outside interests are using Colorado to swing a close election to John Kerry.

Even if we assume that the interests that support 36 are not aligned with a particular candidate, the fact that they are trying to change the rules during the game should raise alarms in voters' minds.