A tied election

There are less than two weeks left for one of the most important elections for world geopolitics and the results are still unpredictable. For a few days now, the bookmakers have given former President Donald Trump as the favorite, while the pollsters show technical ties between Vice President Kamala Harris and the aforementioned Republican candidate.

The former have limited predictive power. This is because the odds depend on the estimates of the bettors, who are not necessarily representative of the population. In addition, the betting markets can be deliberately manipulated by those who hold the capital. An example of how wrong the trends in the gambling centres can be is given by the 2016 election, since on the Monday before the election they gave Hillary Clinton a 75 percentage point advantage over Donald Trump.

The polls have, of course, a much better capacity to reflect the preferences of the citizens. Not only is the strength of each candidate known, but also the size of the statistical error. It is at this point where the American elections become more difficult to model.

The characteristics of the electoral system of the United States make any estimate complex. The presidency is not won by the one who obtains the most citizen votes, but by the one who obtains 270 votes in the “Electoral College”. This collegiate body is made up of 538 representatives elected by popular vote in the federative entities. Each state elects between three and 54 members of the body that decides the next President, so its composition is an inexact image of the electorate.

Thus, in 1968, 2000 and 2016 – to cite a few examples – the candidate that received the most votes from citizens was not the one elected by the College. There are biases caused by the number of members that each entity contributes, as well as by the commonly used rule that the party that wins in each state proposes all the members of the College that correspond to it. This, regardless of the margin by which it obtains its majority.

For those of us who observe from the outside, this indirect method of electing the President is inexplicable. In fact, since its adoption in 1787, there have been around 900 unsuccessful efforts to abolish this mechanism.

The truth is that these initiatives have not prospered because the Electoral College formula is quite rooted in the political history of our northern neighbor. On the one hand, it is the balance achieved by the Nationalists and Confederationists to keep the states politically united. On the other, it reflects the fear shared by some of the founders regarding the decisions that the majority could make. In 1788, Hamilton described how they were uneasy that “the Executive depended only on the will of the people for its permanence… [since]… it could be seen as necessary to sacrifice its duty to complacency.

” It is, derived from this bias caused by the indirect election through the College, that in recent weeks both candidates have focused their efforts only on those states that remain in dispute. Where there is no defined preference, marginal changes can make the College representation move in any direction. Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are in this circumstance and concentrate 17% of the potential to elect representatives of the College.

It will not be strange to see in the next few days that one and the other candidate allocate millions of resources to generate supporters in those states, where the election could be defined. We will also have to be aware of the possible spread of fake news and media wars, which, in the days leading up to an election, tend to intensify when a tie is foreseen.

Nota publicada originalmente en el Heraldo de México