FairVote Blog
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"Incumbency Bumps": Measuring National Partisan Swings By Evaluating the Incumbent Advantage in U.S. House Races, 1996-2012
by Devin McCarthy, Rob Richie // December 4, 2012 //FairVote introduces its updated "incumbency bump" data for the 2012 election. Incumbents once again received a substantial advantage over challengers this year, although that bump was the lowest it has been since FairVote first began analyzing incumbency in 1996.
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Pennsylvania Senate Leader Pileggi Wrong on Prescription for Electoral College Reform
by Rob Richie // December 3, 2012 //Pennsylvania's senate majority leader Dominic Pileggi is backing a new plan to divide his state's electoral votes in the 2016 presidential race. While supported as a means to provide a fair reflection of state voters in the Electoral College, the plan has big downsides -- and falls far short of the National Popular Vote plan. Sen. Pileggi should back the National Popular Vote plan and apply his interest in proportional representation to elections for Congress and the state legislature.
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Ms. Executive: Women Governors in Decline
by Patricia Hart // November 29, 2012 //Women set records in the 2012 elections. More women than ever before will be serving in the Senate next year, as they will occupy 20 seats. Slight increases were made on other fronts as well; the U.S. House and state legislatures will have more women serving in their chambers next year. Nevertheless, progress for women was not ubiquitous in 2012. The number of women governors is in decline.
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A Representative Congress: Enhancing African American Voting Rights in the South with Choice Voting
by Rob Richie, Drew Spencer // November 27, 2012 //In southern states, racially polarized elections remain an active part of political life. Since 1965, the Voting Rights Act has guaranteed that African Americans in the South cannot be shut out of elections either through direct barriers to voting or through discriminatory districts that prevent the achievement of representation. However, relying on winner-take-all elections has inherent limitations. In the belt of southern states including Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas, the use of districting to achieve a fairer level of representation for African Americans has hit a ceiling. To push through that ceiling and achieve truly fair representation, FairVote recommends abandoning the single-member district in favor of super districts elected by choice voting.
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Ukrainian Elections Are Another Example of Partisan Bias Caused by Winner-Take-All
by Sara Helmi, Devin McCarthy // November 26, 2012 //Think the U.S. House elections had a structural bias in favor of one party? The partisan bias in Ukraine's parliamentary elections, held just a week before the American elections, was even worse.
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Electoral College Favored One Party Over the Other in the 2012 Election
by Andrea Levien, Rob Richie // November 21, 2012 //FairVote's analyses of congressional elections show a definitive tilt towards the Republican party, grounded in winner-take-all voting rules and the geographic distribution of Republican and Democratic voters. However, on the presidential level there is currently a distinct Democratic advantage, also resulting from winner-take-all rules. By reforming unfair electoral structures, we can eliminate this bias on both the legislative and executive levels.
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Clashing Mandates and the Role of Voting Structures
by Rob Richie // November 20, 2012 //President Barack Obama won the presidential election by more than four million votes and 129 electoral votes, but Mitt Romney has carried a large majority of U.S. House districts and a majority of House seats are held by Republicans representing a district where Obama was defeated. Those facts point to tensions in the months ahead--and to the value of rethinking our voting rules to ensure a level playing field for all.
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The 2012 Elections and the Vanishing Congressional Moderate
by Devin McCarthy // November 15, 2012 //Many observers of the American political process have bemoaned our increasingly partisan Congress, with representatives from both parties clinging to the party line and refusing to compromise with the other side. If you were hoping that the 2012 elections would help this problem, here's some bad news: things are only getting worse. The congressional moderate is on the verge of extinction.
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Magic Numbers: Small Vote Shifts in Key States Could Have Altered Electoral College Outcomes
by Andrea Levien // November 16, 2012 //One commonly cited benefit of the Electoral College is that, even when the national popular vote for president is close, it creates a decisive victory for one candidate or the other, giving the winner more legitimacy. However, these "decisive" victories are often more tenuous than they seem. There are plenty of elections in which slight vote shifts in key states would have changed the winner of the Electoral College vote, despite the original winners' significantly larger leads in the nationwide vote.
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Tracking Presidential Campaign Field Operations
by Andrea Levien // November 14, 2012 //The most visible ways that Democratic and Republican presidential candidates show favoritism for swing states are through public campaign events and ad spending. However, tracking where candidates opened field offices is another useful method of measuring candidate attention. Unsurprisingly, field office placement in the 2012 presidential election showed a strong bias towards swing states.