[EM] Action

[Narins, Josh]

I have researched 1860. It's quite a spectacle.

Lincoln pretty much cheated to get the party nomination over Seward, using
the corrupt Chicago machine to get the Seward supporters out of the Hall
during the third(?) ballot. 

However, without abandoning the electoral college, it appears as if Lincoln
was the Condorcet Winner in 1860.

He won all but seven of his electoral votes (4-CA and 3-OR) in states where
he won over 50% of the vote. This is one election where we can seriously
doubt that many people were favorite-burying.

This map you might find interesting.
http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/elections/maps/1860.gif
Except, of course, it says Texas went to Bell, when in fact it went to
Breckenridge.

He was also the overall FPTP winner (ignoring the electoral college).

This is an absolutely awesome telling of the story of the Civil War, for my
time.
The links to Horace Greeley editorials was the best part for me. I'm with
Greeley (i.e. Lincoln should have let the 7 States go, the others would not
have followed, and they would have probably come back, anyway)
http://www.tulane.edu/~latner/Background/BackgroundElection.html

For the record, I'm a Northerner who thinks Southern racism still exists,
and we need the Constitutional right to Secede, since it looks like
Southerners completely dominate our Government :)


-----Original Message-----
From: hager2002 at lsh107.siteprotect.com
[mailto:hager2002 at lsh107.siteprotect.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 11, 2002 12:00 PM
To: election-methods-list at eskimo.com
Subject: Re: [EM] Action


Has anyone thought of researching the 1860 Presidential race?  Lincoln's
win with less than 40% of the popular vote gave us the Civil War.  His
opposition split the vote 3 ways: Stephen A. Douglas was the Democrat,
John Breckenridge was the Southern Democrat, and John Bell was the
Constitutional Unionist.  The likelihood that the split would elect
Lincoln was understood by everyone at the time -- it even led a couple of
different state parties to "fuse" their Bell and Douglas electors so that
people who liked either Bell or Douglas voted for the same group of
electors.  It was the EV equivalent of approval voting introduced as a
last minute, stop-gap measure.

Of the dozens of nations that abolished slavery in the 18th and 19th
centuries (over 20 did it in the 19th), the U.S. was the only one that had
to fight a Civil War.  All the rest did it peacefully.  The evidence is
good that slavery would have ended peacefully in the U.S. as well, had the
political system not melted down.  That meltdown was caused by the
electoral system.

I made an attempt to check out the state-by-state voting in the 18 states
Lincoln won, but could only find Oregon.  That state and its 4 EV's
clearly went to Lincoln because of split vote.  There were 303 EV's at
stake, with 152 needed to elect.  Lincoln got 180 EV's so if split vote
gave him more than 28 EV's, it means that AV or Condorcet would have
prevented an EV win.  Based upon the regional vote totals, it appears
that, although Stephen A. Douglas would have been the CW in popular vote,
Lincoln's regional strength would have thrown the election into the House
of Representatives.

Note that the composition of the House of Representatives would have been
very different had AV or Condorcet been used, so it is almost certain that
in the House, Lincoln couldn't have gotten the necessary 17 states to
secure the election.  In the House, the top 3 EV winners would have been
the choices available to its 33 state delegations.  My expectation is
that, based upon the regional data, the top 3 would have been Lincoln,
Douglas, and Bell.  In the real election, the top 3 EV winners were
Lincoln, Breckenridge, and Bell.  Split vote seemed to kill Douglas in
both the free and slave regions of the country.  (Douglas was demonstrably
the only candidate with broad national support.  Bell was clearly
acceptable nationally, but his support was weaker than Douglas'.)

The Civil War is of great general interest, and a completely fresh piece
of historical analysis would almost certainly have a lot of attention.
It may be that Lincoln's regional strength was such that even AV or
Condorcet would not have prevented an EV win, but I'd be surprised if that
were so.  If it were, it would be a compelling argument that the Electoral
College caused the Civil War, which in and of itself would make the
research newsworthy.

My focus has to be on winning the nomination and then winning a long-shot
third party campaign, so I'm not going to pursue this research as long as
I'm a candidate.  Is anyone in this group interested?

Also, if anyone is interested in doing this research, please keep me in
the loop as far as raw data is concerned.

--paul

On Wed, 10 Apr 2002, Alex Small wrote:

> I notice there aren't any takers on joining a short "white paper", written
> to generate press attention.  I doubt that the press would read the report
> (do they ever?) but it needs to exist before we can issue press releases.
> I still think a well-argued proposal for election reform by a group of
> scientists who know how to sell their ideas could get some attention.
>
> In the past couple years research on voting machines at MIT and Caltech
has
> gotten some coverage.  Normally the engineers building those machines are
> about as obscure as the people who design mousetraps.  However, right now
> this topic has some appeal.  Let's not let it go to waste.
>
> I volunteer to research Eastern European elections, on the condition that
I
> get volunteers for the other sections:
>
> 1.  Abstract
> 2.  Advantages of Approval over plurality and IRV
> 3.  Australia
> 4.  Prospects for reform:  States where voters can bring about local and
> state-wide ballot measures, states where election laws are at least
> partially local (easier for grass-roots efforts), and how many state and
> federal races may have been influenced by a third party in 2000 (even just
> the number of such races where nobody had a majority is OK).
>
> Any takers?
>
> Alex
>

--
paul hager		hager2002 at hager2002.org

"The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason."
			-- Thomas Paine, THE AGE OF REASON



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