Rigged elections? Yes

Richard Fulton

Candidate and then president Donald Trump liked to claim that the elections in America are rigged. I tend to agree with him.

I agree, at least, to the extent that, number one, there is a flaw in the U.S. Constitution and, number two, there is a massive flaw in the way we are able to elect the people who populate the legislatures in our country.

To look at the first point, the founders of our country were faced with many obstacles in building a united country. There were splits between large states and small states and suspicions between north and south states.

In forming the national legislature, then, the constitutional convention decided to compromise by giving each state equal representation in the Senate (2) and the House would be divided on the basis of population. The presidency elections would follow this compromise by giving each state electoral college votes based on the number of members of Congress they had.

Thus the rigged election of the president since small states (with two senators but smaller populations) have a disproportionate say in who becomes president. Democracy took a hit here. Prime example, Donald Trump won the most electoral college votes, thus became president, but the rigged system failed Hillary Clinton who won three million more votes.

So you are right Mr. President, the election was constitutionally rigged.

Then there is the political rigging of the elections for members of the lower houses of America’s legislatures. To be fair, each district for the state and national lower houses should have roughly the same number of people in them and they should not be divided up to give an undue advantage for one party.

It’s called gerrymandering. And it is distorting our elections, thus our democracy. Lines are redrawn every ten years to reflect the shifts in populations. The majority party in state legislatures generally draw the new boundaries of districts.

The Associated Press did a study of all 435 national House seats and all 4,700 lower house state legislatures. They used a new statistical method of calculating partisan advantage in able to ferret out political gerrymandering (gerrymandering for racial purposes has been declared unconstitutional).

What they found, as reported in an AP story recently, was that “four times as many states had Republican-skewed state House districts than Democratic ones”. There are 24 states that dominate the number of House members, and within them there were three times as many Republican-tilted House districts as Democratic ones.

All this resulted in at least 22 more House seats statistically than expected by average national vote share in districts. Thus a 241-194 member Republican majority in the House, a ten percent point margin in seats.

The kicker is that Republican candidates received only one percent more votes in House elections nationally than Democrats. Gerrymandering distorted the probabilities of Republican victories a Princeton University study found in relation to statistical probability (especially in state House districts, the ones who will draw the district lines in 2020).

This is why 40 percent of state House districts had only one candidate running for the office. Some states had 75 percent of their districts with no contest. This is democracy?

This is why the Supreme Court of the U.S. has agreed to hear next term a case in Wisconsin that has a particularly grievous political gerrymandering. Let’s hope they do something about this embarrassing situation for a supposedly democratic country.

So you see, President Trump, you are right. Elections in America are rigged. And this time they were rigged in your favor while ongoing they are rigged in favor of Republican dominated legislatures.

Richard Fulton is an emeritus professor of political science.