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The Electoral College Experts Audience Dialogue (Part 5)

Moderator: Arnold I. Barnett PhD '73
Judith Best Robert Hardaway Robert Bennett Paul Schumaker Akhil Amar John Fortier Alan Natapoff Alexander S. Belenky Vikram Amar Alexander Keyssar: October 17, 2008; Running Time: 1:34:21

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

Audience members take the floor in this last of five sessions debating whether to retain or discard the Electoral College system. Through question, answer and general discussion, the panelists further elucidate their positions on the main conference topic.

The following is a short list of discussion areas raised by audience questions:

Panelists engage around how a national popular vote system would impact minority groups. Judith Best and Robert Hardaway believe that minorities in swing states have an advantage in our current system, and a change would mean losing that leverage. Robert Bennett, Paul Schumaker, and Akhil Amar dispute this.

John Fortier, Schumaker, Alan Natapoff, and Vikram and Akhil Amar discuss whether a national popular vote would have the effect of mobilizing voter organization and participation at a community level. Fortier doesn’t see a panacea in the popular election, while Schumaker sees very positive consequences. Akhil Amar believes there will be “more close elections in the future than in the past,” due to 24/7 polling made possible by new technologies. Natapoff declares that “simple national voting creates pernicious incentives to play off one group against another.”

An audience member comments on the “denigration of third parties” during the conference and wonders how a change in election systems might affect the emergence of viable, elect-able third party candidates. Alexander Keyssar notes that the U.S. is the only country in the world where no new political party has come to power in the 20th century. “It’s possible that’s because our two political parties are so magnificent…” he says. Other panelists point out the dangers of multiparty elections, and the possibility of elections being thrown into the House of Representatives. Some suggest adopting instant runoff elections. Akhil Amar cites a law of political science that “when you have one office up for grabs, you’re generally going to have two parties vying for it in long-term equilibrium.”

One audience member wonders what foreign nations might offer the U.S. in terms of election process. Natapoff claims that our current system is essentially parliamentary, and Akhil Amar retorts “our system is so far from parliamentary as to be staggering.” Keyssar adds that our Electoral College, while like a parliament, is not an ongoing body. Amar believes that while we have much to learn from other systems, they won’t be adopted at the federal level unless “they’re road-tested in the states and proved to be workable.”

If the U.S. generally produces only two viable candidates, and the Electoral College handles this kind of election well, why move to a popular vote? Alexander Belenky responds that with the EC, just 11 states can elect a president. “If in those states the turnout is low and the rest of the country’s turnout is high, it may be that a small percentage of the popular vote will elect the president.”

The panelists devote additional time to discussing each other’s suggestions for modifying the Electoral College and other changes to the voting system, and discuss in detail how runoff voting works.

Lecture Details

Location: Bartos Theater

About the Speakers

Moderator: Arnold I. Barnett PhD '73

George Eastman Professor of Management Science, MIT Sloan School of Management

Arnold Barnett is one of the nation’s foremost authorities on aviation security. He uses statistical techniques to probe social and organizational issues. Barnett heads an FAA research team to investigate antiterrorist measures. He has also written at length about crime and punishment, war casualties, and the misuse of statistics in the media.

The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences honored him with the 1996 President’s Award for outstanding contributions to the betterment of society. In 2002, he received the President’s Citation from the Flight Safety Foundation for “truly outstanding contributions on behalf of safety.”

Barnett holds a B.A. in Physics from Columbia College and a Ph.D.in Mathematics from MIT.

Judith Best

Professor of Political Science, State University of New York, Cortland

Judith Best teaches about political theory, American government and American political thought and jurisprudence. She has numerous publications, including: The Choice of the People? Debating the Electoral College (1996) and The Case Against Direct Election of the President: A Defense of the Electoral College(1975). She has spoken frequently before Congress and the public on the Electoral College System. She received her M.A. from the University of Michigan and her Ph.D. from Cornell University. Best has been a member of the Cortland faculty since 1973.

Robert Hardaway

Professor of Law, University of Denver College of Law

After graduating from Amherst College in 1968 and Order of the Coif from New York University Law School, Robert Hardaway joined the U.S. Navy JAG Corps where he processed civil claims and also served as both a prosecutor and criminal defense lawyer. After serving four years, he joined the Denver law firm of Rovira, Demuth, and Eiberger where he practiced civil litigation. He also later served as a Deputy District attorney for Arapahoe County and rounded out his litigation career as a Colorado Deputy Public Defender, where he handled hundreds of felony cases, including death penalty cases. From there, he first entered academia as a clinical supervisor at the University of Denver College of Law, ultimately becoming a tenured Professor of Law.

He is the author of 14 published books on law and public policy, and 29 law review articles, reviews, and articles in professional journals. More recently, he has expanded the scope of his professional writing to include docudramas and law-related fiction and novels and appears frequently on television and in the media commenting on legal issues.

Robert Bennett

Nathaniel L. Nathanson Professor of Law, Northwestern University Law School

A scholar in the field of constitutional law, Robert Bennett has been a member of the faculty of the Northwestern University School of Law since 1969, serving as the school’s dean from 1985 to 1995. Bennett frequently teaches a seminar in the Law of American Democracy and courses in contracts, legislation, constitutional law, and constitutional theory. Bennett has also taught as a visiting professor at the University of Illinois College of Law, the University of Virginia School of Law, the University of Southern California Law Center, Brooklyn Law School, and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University.

Paul Schumaker

Professor of Political Science, University of Kansas

Paul Schumaker has been a professor at the University of Kansas since 1990. He has published a number of books, including From Ideologies to Public Philosophies: An Introduction to Political Theory (Blackwell, 2008); and Choosing our President: The Electoral College and Beyond (edited with Burdett Loomis, Chatham House, 2002). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1973.

Akhil Amar

Professor of Law, Yale University Law School

Akhil Reed Amar teaches constitutional law at both Yale College and Yale Law School. He received his B.A. in 1980 from Yale College, and his J.D. in 1984 from Yale Law School, where he served as an editor of The Yale Law Journal. After clerking for Judge Stephen Breyer, U.S. Court of Appeals, 1st Circuit, Amar joined the Yale faculty in 1985. Amar is the co-editor of a leading constitutional law casebook, Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking. He is also the author of several books, including The Constitution and Criminal Procedure: First Principles (Yale Univ. Press, 1997), The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction (Yale Univ. Press, 1998), and most recently, America’s Constitution: A Biography (Random House, 2005).

John Fortier

Research Fellow, American Enterprise Institute

John Fortier is the principal contributor to the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project and executive director of the Continuity of Government Commission. A political scientist who has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Delaware, Boston College, and Harvard University, Fortier has written numerous scholarly and popular articles. His books include Absentee and Early Voting: Trends, Promises, and Perils (2006), After the People Vote: A Guide to the Electoral College (2004), and Second-Term Blues: How George W. Bush Has Governed (2007). Fortier writes a column for Politico and is a frequent radio and television commentator on the presidency, Congress, and elections. He received his B.A. from Georgetown University and his Ph.D. from Boston College.

Alan Natapoff

Research Scientist, MIT

Alan Natapoff studied physics at Cornell, and as a graduate student in particle physics at Berkeley. He came to MIT as a postdoctoral fellow in biology and brain sciences and, since 1969, has been a research scientist at MIT's Center for Space Research in the Man-Vehicle Laboratory.

For several decades, Natapoff has been interested in the problems of voting power and was technical advisor to Harvard Medical School's faculty in the design of its voting system. In 1977 he was invited to testify on the design of the Electoral College before the Senate Judiciary's subcommittee on Constitutional Rights. In 1996, his views on the Electoral College appeared in Public Choice under the title, "A mathematical one-man one-vote rationale for Madisonian presidential voting based on maximum individual voting power."

Alexander S. Belenky

Visiting Scholar, MIT Center for Engineering Systems Fundamentals

Alexander S. Belenky is the author of books and scientific articles in the fields of optimization and game theory and their applications in transportation, industry, agriculture, environmental protection, advertising, brokerage, auctioning, and U.S. presidential elections.

He is the author of Operations Research in Transportation Systems: Ideas and Schemes of Optimization Methods for Strategic Planning and Operations Management(2004). He is also the author of the books How America Chooses Its Presidents (2007) Extreme Outcomes of U.S. Presidential Elections (2003) and Winning the U.S. Presidency: Rules of the Game and Playing by the Rules (2004). He was an invited guest on radio and TV talk shows throughout the country in the course of the 2004 election campaign. His co-authored opinion pieces about voting systems have appeared in The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, and The New York Times.

Belenky holds a Ph.D. in systems analysis and mathematics and D.Sc. in applications of mathematical methods.

Vikram Amar

Professor of Law, University of California, Davis Law School
Associate Dean for Academic Affairs

Vikram Amar rejoined the UC Davis Law School (where he was a faculty member from 1993-1998) in 2007, after teaching at UC Hastings for a decade. He received a bachelor's degree in history from the University of California at Berkeley and his J.D. from Yale, where he served as an articles Editor for the Yale Law Journal. After law school in 1988, Amar clerked for Judge William A. Norris of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and then for Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the United States Supreme Court. He has also taught regularly as a Visiting Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Law and at the UCLA School of Law.

Alexander Keyssar

Professor of History and Social Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

Alexander Keyssar is an historian by training, and has specialized in the excavation of issues that have contemporary policy implications. His 1986 book, Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts, was awarded three scholarly prizes. His book, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (2000), was named the best book in U.S. history by both the American Historical Association and the Historical Society; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Keyssar is coauthor of Inventing America, a text integrating the history of technology and science into the mainstream of American history. In 2004/5, Keyssar chaired the Social Science Research Council's National Research Commission on Voting and Elections.