universally known to be adictatorshipormilitary regimewill frequently
use fraudulent elections to disguise their actual mechanisms for political
selection.
Elections can be carried out by a wide variety of techniques. Votes can be
given to individuals, as in most national elections, to collective entities (for
example national delegations to theUnited Nations) or to institutional units
(for exampletrade unionbranches). Thevotingprocedure may be secret,
public or even recorded and published, as in many legislative assemblies. Votes
may be counted according to any one of a dozen or more methods ranging
from varieties of pureproportional representationto the simplest ‘first-
past-the-post’ plurality system (seevoting systems). All that elections have in
common is that they are a method of selecting one or more candidates for
office from a wider field by aggregating the individual preferences and
counting them. Historically, elections have been only one among many
methods of selection, and they became the totally dominant method only in
the 20th century. There is no necessary connection between elections and
democracy, for even monarchies have been elective, and the selection of
leaders in one-party states involves election, though the effective electorate is
likely to consist of a handful of leading party figures, even if their choice is then
submitted to a confirming ‘popular’ election. In fact elections will occur
whenever selection does not depend on the will of a single person, force, or
some special concept oflegitimacy.
Electoral College
An electoral college is a group of people who have been specially appointed,
nominated or elected in order that they should hold an election for a political
office. It thus constitutes a way of making election to some significant position
of power indirect rather than direct. The most important example of a modern
electoral college is perhaps that which elects the American president. Lists of
electors tied to particular presidential and vice-presidential candidatures appear
on the ballot paper, and once the votes have been counted the list with the
most votes on a simple plurality basis takes all that state’s electoral college votes.
The candidates with a majority in the electoral college become president and
vice-president respectively. If no candidature has an overall majority in the
electoral college the House of Representatives then votes, by state, to deter-
mine who is to become president, and the Senate, voting as individuals, elects
the vice-president. So complete is the domination of US politics by the
Democratic Partyand theRepublican Partythat the most any third-party
candidate, such as Ralph Nader or Ross Perot, is likely to achieve is to deprive
both principal candidates of a majority in the election and thus force the
Electoral College