[EM] NOTB

[Matthew Shugart]

Let us not forget that one very crucial purpose of elections is to produce
a result.  I don't like "non of the above" options because it raises the
potential of not filling a seat.  In the case of a single congressional
district, that is bad for those citizens, but not a disaster for the
country.  But what if the presidency can't be filled, because NOTA (or
NOTB) keeps "winning"?  That could be a constitutinal crisis.  So could the
inability ot fill a quaorum of seats in either house.

Some ex-Soviet republics (e.g. Ukraine, Belarus) have similar rules, in
effect.  Some require very high victory threshods, such as either requiring
a high turnout to validate the election, or that a candidate must receive
50%+1 of the *potential* electortate to win a seat.  Recently, Belarus went
several months without a congress because the threshold had not been
reached in most districts.  Ukraine has many seats unfilled.

This is what could conceivably happen if we had NOTB options.  Think about it.

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Matthew Shugart
Associate Professor of Political Science

Address:
Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, CA 92093-0519

Phone:  619-534-5016
Fax:     619-534-3939
E-mail:  mshugart at ucsd.edu
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