Who Will Be the Next President?

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book addresses the peculiarities of the current presidential election system not yet addressed in other publications. It argues that any rules for electing a President that may have a chance to replace the current ones should provide an equal representation of states as equal members of the Union, and of the nation as a whole. This book analyzes the National Popular Vote plan and shows that this plan may violate the Supreme Court decisions on the equality of votes cast in statewide popular elections held to choose state electors. That is, the National Popular Vote plan may violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The book proposes a new election system in which the will of the states and the will of the nation as a whole are determined by direct popular elections for President and Vice President in the 50 states and in D.C. This system a) would elect President a candidate who is the choice of boththe nation as a whole and of the states as equal members of the Union, b) would let the current system elect a President only if the nation as a whole and the states as equal members of the Union fail to agree on a common candidate, and c) would encourage the candidates to campaign nationwide. The second edition has been updated to include a proposal on how to make established non-major party presidential candidates and independent candidates welcome participants in national televised presidential debates with the major-party candidates.

Alexander S. Belenky is the author of books and scientific articles in the fields of optimization and game theory and their applications in transportation, industry, agriculture, environmental protection, advertising, brokerage, auctioning, and U.S. presidential elections. He is the author of Operations Research in Transportation Systems: Ideas and Schemes of Optimization Methods for Strategic Planning and Operations Management-published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1998 and republished by Springer in 2010-which has been adopted by many leading American Universities. Also, he is the author of the books Extreme Outcomes of US Presidential Elections (2003), Winning the US Presidency: Rules of the Game and Playing by the Rules (2004), and How America Chooses Its Presidents (2007, 2009). He was an invited guest on radio and TV talk shows throughout the country in the course of the 2004 election campaign, and he was the invited Guest Editor of Mathematical Modeling of Voting Systems and Elections: Theory and Applications, a special edition of Mathematical and Computer Modelling (2008), Currently, Alexander S. Belenky is a tenured professor at the Department of Mathematics for Economics and a leading scientist at the Decision Choice and Analysis Laboratory at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Russia, and a visiting scholar at the MIT Center for Engineering Systems Fundamentals. He holds a Ph.D. degree in systems analysis and mathematics and a D.Sc. degree in applications of mathematical methods. His opinion pieces about voting systems have appeared in The Baltimore Sun, The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, The Plain Dealer, Providence Journal and in other newspapers.

1 The Initial Design of the Electoral College: Basic Ideas,Logical Mistakes, and Overlooked Problems.- 2 The Electoral College Today.- 3 Curbing Contingent Elections.- 4 Inconvenient Facts About the Electoral College.- 5 The Electoral College and Campaign Strategies.- 6 The National Popular Vote Plan: A Brilliant Idea or a Dead-on-Arrival Delusion?.- 7 Equalizing the Will of the States and the Will of the Nation.- 8. Conclusion: Fundamental Merits, Embedded Deficiencies, and Some Urgent Problems of the U.S. Presidential Election System.