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Luke Combs, politics and healing our nation's divide

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Ducks

The 12 worst House districts: Experts label gerrymandering's dirty dozen

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Our Elections 'region' last dance features 2 princesses

Our Elections 'region' last dance features 2 princesses
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Our Staff
By Our StaffApr 29, 2020
Our Staff
The Fulcrum staff.
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Not one but two Cinderella teams have made it to the championship round of the Elections bracket in our reader-driven Democracy Madness contest.

Our No. 9 seed, the proposal to have fewer House seats but with several members elected from each congressional district, is taking on an even bigger underdog— No. 11, getting states to award their electoral votes to the national (not their own) winner of the presidential popular vote.

But which will be the belle of the ball?

Multimember districts had its biggest win of the tournament, over instituting term limits for Supreme Court justices. Meanwhile, the National Popular Vote Compact snuck past the No. 2 seed, creating independent commissions to draw legislative districts — the biggest upset of the tournament.

The finals last through Thursday, so press the Vote Now button to take your pick. (For more on the proposals, click the matchup, then each label.)

Sixteen proposals for reforming money in politics will get contested starting Monday. By the middle of May you will have chosen the single best of 64 ideas for fixing our democratic system.



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A better direction for democracy reform

Denver election judge Eric Cobb carefully looks over ballots as counting continued on Nov. 6. Voters in Colorado rejected a ranked choice voting and open primaries measure.

Helen H. Richardson/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images

A better direction for democracy reform

Drutman is a senior fellow at New America and author "Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America."

This is the conclusion of a two-part, post-election series addressing the questions of what happened, why, what does it mean and what did we learn? Read part one.

I think there is a better direction for reform than the ranked choice voting and open primary proposals that were defeated on Election Day: combining fusion voting for single-winner elections with party-list proportional representation for multi-winner elections. This straightforward solution addresses the core problems voters care about: lack of choices, gerrymandering, lack of competition, etc., with a single transformative sweep.

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To-party doom loop
Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America

Let’s make sense of the election results

Drutman is a senior fellow at New America and author of "Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America."

Well, here are some of my takeaways from Election Day, and some other thoughts.

1. The two-party doom loop keeps getting doomier and loopier.

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Person voting in Denver

A proposal to institute ranked choice voting in Colorado was rejected by voters.

RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images

Despite setbacks, ranked choice voting will continue to grow

Mantell is director of communications for FairVote.

More than 3 million people across the nation voted for better elections through ranked choice voting on Election Day, as of current returns. Ranked choice voting is poised to win majority support in all five cities where it was on the ballot, most notably with an overwhelming win in Washington, D.C. – 73 percent to 27 percent.

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Electoral College map

It's possible Donald Trump and Kamala Harris could each get 269 electoral votes this year.

Chessrat, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Electoral College rules are a problem. A worst-case tie may be ahead.

Johnson is the executive director of the Election Reformers Network, a national nonpartisan organization advancing common-sense reforms to protect elections from polarization. Keyssar is a Matthew W. Stirling Jr. professor of history and social policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. His work focuses on voting rights, electoral and political institutions, and the evolution of democracies.

It’s the worst-case presidential election scenario — a 269–269 tie in the Electoral College. In our hyper-competitive political era, such a scenario, though still unlikely, is becoming increasingly plausible, and we need to grapple with its implications.

Recent swing-state polling suggests a slight advantage for Kamala Harris in the Rust Belt, while Donald Trump leads in the Sun Belt. If the final results mirror these trends, Harris wins with 270 electoral votes. But should Trump take the single elector from Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district — won by Joe Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2016 — then both candidates would be deadlocked at 269.

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