The Congressional seat runoff in Georgia has come to the forefront now that the presidential election has been decided. Democrats will have control of the White House come inauguration day, January 20th, 2021. The next major battle in United States politics is over which political party will gain control of the Senate. Georgia utilizes the rarely used majority rule, runoff election format to pick the Senate members from its state. After the election, no candidate was able to meet the majority threshold. Now, a runoff election will take place in January with the top two vote-getters going head to head. After one candidate is elected, then another runoff will occur to elect the second winner. A majority, runoff election has never had a larger impact on the decision making process in the United States.
The Senate contains 100 seats, and currently, there are 48 Democrats and 50 Republicans in the Senate. The two seats that are up for grabs in Georgia could be pivotal since control of the Senate is hanging in the balance. If two Democratic candidates can secure the spots, then the Senate is split 50-50, and the Democrats will effectively have control over the Senate. They will have control because in the case of ties the vice president, Democrat Kamala Harris, will cast the tie breaking vote. If one Republican candidate is able to win either runoff, then the Republicans will retain control of the Senate. All eyes in the political world will be focused on the majority rule, runoff elections in Georgia for the next couple of months as the struggle for political power in the United States continues.
1 comment:
As a Georgia voter, this story is very important to me. It got me thinking about topics we've discussed in public choice like rational ignorance and the Condorcet paradox. We currently have 2 seats in the Senate up for grabs in Georgia and one of them is a special election. When I received my ballot I was shocked to find that there were 20 (!) candidates for that position, and the only name I had heard of was the incumbent, Kelly Loeffler. It seemed obvious to me that this election would end in a runoff, how could one expect that one candidate would get a majority when there were 19 other choices? But then that got me thinking about rational ignorance: did my vote matter in this case? There was going to be a runoff anyway so why should I care about it now, or was there now a greater probability that my vote would matter because it would be split so many ways? I also thought about the possibility that the most preferred candidate by the population may not win the runoff nor even get to the runoff as a result of the Condorcet paradox. It was entirely possible that one of the 17 candidates who didn't reach 10% would have been the Condorcet winner, but because of the voting system we have in Georgia someone else will end up earning the seat.
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