How the Electoral College Works To Cabin Fraud and Misconduct

The Constitution's Electoral College arrangement for selecting a president has long been the object of popular and scholarly discontent, for well- known reasons. It sometimes elevates a winner who lost the popular vote, it gives states influence that is not always proportional to the size of their electorates, it encourages candidates to spend time campaigning in a handful of swing states, and so forth. In a recent Cato Research Brief in Economic Policy, Georgy Egorov and Konstantin Sonin argue that one countervailing advantage of the Electoral College (EC) often goes unappreciated: it reduces the danger that presidential elections will be decided by fraud or misconduct. To begin with, the EC renders fraud in presidential elections unavailing, and thus disincentivizes it, in states where the race is not going to be close enough for it to make a difference. In the 2020 election, only about a half- dozen states were close enough for the Trump campaign to contest after the fact.