Winner Take All

Most elections, whether of government officials or officers of private clubs, are decided on the winner-take-all system. It is the simplest kind of election to conduct and the easiest to understand: the person who receives the most votes wins the office being sought.

Members of Congress, governors, other state constitutional officers, and most state legislators are elected under the winner-take-all rule. They run either statewide or in single-member districts (the whole state in those states that, because of their small population, have only one at-large House seat) and win if they receive at least a plurality of the vote.

A more complicated system, proportional representation, is more likely to give fair representation to the various racial, ethnic, and other demographic or political groups within a state or district. Under proportional representation, seats are distributed among candidates in proportion to their share of the popular vote. To do this, however, requires the use of multimember districts or a similar form of multiple representation in the geographical area covered by the election. Then if a ten-member district is 40 percent African American, for example, the black community has a reasonable chance of winning four of the ten seats if it puts up a full complement of candidates.

A few states had multimember congressional districts until Congress abolished them in 1842. Some state legislative districts or city council wards still elect multiple members.

In presidential primaries, delegates to the national party conventions usually are awarded on the basis of proportional representation rather than winner-take-all. In many cases a candidate must meet a threshold rule, such as 15 percent of the vote, before winning any delegates. Some Republican primaries use winner take all, but the Democratic Party does not allow them.

Presidential elections—in which the victor must win an absolute majority of the 538 votes in the electoral college—are essentially won or lost on a winner-take-all basis. In all but two states, the winner of the statewide popular vote receives all of the state's electoral votes.

The exceptions are Nebraska, which has five electoral votes, and Maine, which has four. In both states, the statewide winner is automatically accorded two electoral votes, but the remaining votes are allotted to the winner in each of the states' [Page 676]congressional districts. Though it is possible for the loser of the statewide vote to nonetheless finish ahead in an individual district and thus earn an electoral vote, this never happened until 2008 when Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama won enough votes in one congressional district in Nebraska to gain an electoral vote even while losing the state to his opponent, Sen. John McCain.