At my high school, each senior is required to conduct an extensive year-long senior project involving research, a community benefit, and a product.  I chose to look at reform of the electoral college, and while the research became somewhat tedious given that more or less the same things have been said about it over and over again, I did gain a huge amount of knowledge about a topic that is central to our political process but not comprehended as well as it should be.

For my benefit, I worked on Draft Bloomberg, helping in a very, very small way to influence the political process in the U.S. Bloomberg’s possible candidacy was always tangentially related to the electoral college, because any discussion of what percent of the votes he could win (even believers would admit that it probably couldn’t have been more than 40%) must be accompanied by a rational strategy for winning an electoral college majority. If no candidate wins an electoral college majority, the president is elected by the House, making Bloomberg’s chances of winning small. Some proposed complicated contingency plans involving cabinet seats or policy promises, but ultimately, there was no clear way for Bloomberg to become president.

One of the schemes I came up with was to have Bloomberg call upon the other two candidates to recognize the unfairness of the House contingent election and the fact that a popular vote plurality winner might not become president.  Since electors are chosen by state parties, the candidates could direct their party apparatusses to ensure electors would vote for the national popular vote winner regardless of who won in their state, ensuring that the national popular vote winner would be elected president.  This is essentially a way of implementing the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (which will hopefully be in effect by 2016—which could be to late) with the need for any legislation.

Read the paper I wrote about this for my product (apologies if the writing is less than perfect).

I am constructing a list of free software and websites that I have found useful for notetaking, research management, presentation, and other educational purposes at my new wiki.  It should be interesting to see what new usecases arise for these programs in a university setting.