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Fun with Electoral College Math
by Fig
So I think the Electoral College is a bad system for a number of reasons, but I want to focus on one major reason in this article. For starters, it really seems to give the wrong impression about how divided this nation is, and how Presidents score a “mandate” because of electoral college numbers that look like a landslide when the popular vote is anything but, essentially it can totally misrepresent the will of the people on what is by far the most important election vote we cast. Take the 2012 numbers. Obama had a convincing Electoral College win, but the actual popular vote was a mere 3.5 million voters in his favor. Out of a nation of 330 million, that is a pretty slim margin if you ask me, yet people seem to think he crushed Romney, and clearly it was close. Very close.
So I wanted to take it a step further and see how far we could make the numbers produce absurd results. What I did was look at how many votes a state was won by, totaling those “excess” votes. For instance, Texas was carried by 1,261,359 votes, which were not needed to secure the state’s electoral total. What I did was add up all those “excess votes” for states that went for Romney, and I came up with just over 6.7 million Romney votes that were over what was needed to secure those particular states for him.
Now without changing who anyone voted for, we are going to wave a magic wand and move those excess votes to states that went to Obama by slim margins. We are going to sprinkle those votes around the nation as if those people merely lived in other states to see how best they can move a state from Blue to Red, and go down the list until we run out of those 6.7 million extra Romney votes. How much can we skew things in Romney’s favor electorally without adjusting the popular vote at all? Turns out we can skew it pretty heavily to a very dominant Romney victory.
In fact, what that little game of moving voters to other states does is give Romney every state except for CA and NY, for a “landslide” Romney win of 461 electoral votes to 84 while losing the popular vote by 3.5 million in a 2 way race. And again because I can’t stress this enough, we haven’t changed who anyone voted for, just where they live.
This shows me that the system has some serious theoretical issues, which anyone constructing large scale systems knows mean there are some serious issues. If this was a software program, this would be flagged as a bug, a serious one. We have changed our voting system over the years, which is why I always roll my eyes when I hear the usual defense along the lines of this is how the Founding Fathers wanted it. Which of course isn’t true because apparently at one point they wanted only land owning white guys to vote and black people counted for 3/5ths of a vote, so things change. This is one thing that should also change.
graphic via shutterstock.com