CNN reports on a possible election recount in Virginia: The Republican in Virginia’s attorney general race will request a recount after the official results released Monday showed state Sen. Mark Obenshain behind Democratic state Sen. Mark Herring by a razor-thin margin of about .007%. Obenshain lost by 165 votes out of 2.2 million, marking the […]
Archive | Elections
Could VA AG Race Go to Federal Court?
The Virginia Attorney General’s race remains too close to call. At last count, Democratic State Senator Mark R. Herring had a slim lead over Republican State Senator Mark D. Obenshain. If the lead evaporates, will Democrats take the contest to federal court? Rick Hasen thinks they might. His article in Slate begins: The race for […]
How Best to Secede from a State
By Eugene Kontorovich on October 11, 2013 5:52 am in Constitutional Law, Constitutional Theory, Elections, Federalism, Originalism, Secession, Uncategorized
Some spirit of secession has spread across the land, with various areas in Maryland, Colorado, Texas, California and elsewhere discussing seceding from their states, because of political alienation arising from significant differences in values and preferences. I don’t take the political prospects of American secession movements too seriously, and assume their principal purpose is to […]
San Diego’s Recall Election and California Constitution Art. 3, Sec. 3.5
San Diego’s mayor, Bob Filner, has been accused of widespread sexual harassment (and even assault). He is the subject of a recall petition, and today marks the official beginning of the signature-gathering period. But San Diego’s laws governing recall are both somewhat confusingly-written, and remarkably stringent. The city attorney has already issued three legal opinions […]
A Knowledgeable but Selfish Electorate May be Better than a Well-Meaning but Ignorant One
By Ilya Somin on August 8, 2013 2:50 pm in Democracy, Democracy and Political Ignorance, Elections, Political Ignorance, Public Opinion
In my last post, I discussed economist Dwight R. Lee’s article about why most of the electorate does not decide who to vote for on the basis of narrow self-interest. Unfortunately, the very same incentive structure that leads most voters to base their decisions on the public interest also leads most of them to be […]
Selfish Voters are Not the Problem that Ails Democracy
By Ilya Somin on August 8, 2013 11:40 am in Democracy and Political Ignorance, Elections, Political Ignorance, Public Opinion
Both right and left have standard stories explaining how selfish voters often prevent the government from adopting good policies. The right-wing story – made famous by Mitt Romney’s much-derided “47 percent” speech last year – is that voters become dependent on government transfer programs and then support those programs despite the harm they cause to […]
Obama Probably Did Not Win the 2012 Election by Violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
In a recent post, co-blogger Stewart Baker writes that there is “a very real possibility” that the Obama campaign won the 2012 election by increasing turnout among its supporters, using tactics that violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. It is difficult to definitively disprove such claims. But the available evidence cuts the other way […]
The Virginia GOP’s Rotten Electoral Vote Plan
James Taranto is not persuaded by some of the arguments against the GOP plan to change Virginia’s method of awarding electoral votes from winner-take-all to allocating votes based on the winner of each congressional district and awarding the remaining two votes to the candidate who wins the most districts. Nonetheless, he opposes the plan because […]
Citizens United and the Fall of the Roman Republic
By Ilya Somin on November 27, 2012 7:49 pm in Election Law, Elections, First Amendment, Freedom of Speech, Restrictions on Campaign Contrbs. and Expenses
In a recent Slate article, Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni claim that the history of the fall of the Roman Republic strengthens the case against the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, which ruled that the First Amendment protects corporate and union political speech against restriction by government. The influence of money in politics, they […]
Posner Defends the Electoral College
The ever-iconoclastic Judge Richard Posner has a column in Slate defending the Electoral College. Although the Electoral College is somewhat undemocratic, in that a candidate may win the election without securing a majority of the popular vote, Posner identifies five practical reasons for keeping it in place. I am not sure I agree with all […]
Public Opinion on the Role of Government
Commentators such as liberal E.J. Dionne and even libertarian David Harsanyi are claiming that the election results prove that Obama won a great referendum on the role of government in American society, achieving a mandate for expanded government intervention. The CNN exit polls tell a very different story. 51 percent of voters said that government […]
Presidential Preferences of George Mason Law Students
As co-blogger David Bernstein notes, the two of us conducted anonymous online presidential polls of our Constitutional Law I classes. Here are my results, for a poll conducted over the weekend just before election day: Barack Obama (Democrat): 29 Mitt Romney (Republican): 18 Gary Johnson (Libertarian Party): 2 Jill Stein (Green Party): 1 Other: 0 […]
Is it Unjust to Require Children to Pass a Knowledge Test to Vote, but Not Adults?
By Ilya Somin on November 8, 2012 12:27 am in Election Law, Elections, Political Ignorance, Voting Rights for Children
Canadian legal blogger Leonid Sirota has posted an interesting response to my post advocating extension of the franchise to politically knowledgeable children. He argues that it is unjust to require children to pass a knowledge test for voting, but not adults. He would therefore prefer to lower the voting age to 16 instead: Pour ma […]
Explaining Obama’s Victory
Beginning today, pundits are going to offer a wide range of explanations for Obama’s victory. But I think the simplest and most obvious is that he won because the economy had improved just enough since 2008 to give him the edge. As I pointed out back in September, standard models of presidential election outcomes based […]
A Few Thoughts about the Election
(1) The Republicans’ other demographic problem: Sure, the GOP needs to reach out to the growing Hispanic population. But the bigger problem is that single women vote overwhelmingly Democratic, and for the first time in American history there are more single women than married women. Single women are much more economically vulnerable than are married […]