Stories tagged electoral college

On November 4, America will go to the polls and choose its next president. But we do not vote for the president directly. Rather, we vote for electors to represent our state in the Electoral College, and they ultimately choose the president.

By a strange quirk of math, voting in an indirect, divided election such as this actually gives vote4rs more power than if we voted in a direct election. The best way to explain is through an example:

• In 2004, over 121 million people voted for the top two candidates. If we had held a direct election, the winner would need one more than half of those votes—60,500,001. (Roughly.)
• But in our electoral system, a candidate doesn’t need a majority in the entire nation. Instead, they need to win a majority in the ten largest states. In 2004, those states had a combined voting population of over 66 million. So a candidate would need only 33,000,010 votes to win.

So, your favorite candidate needs only about half as many votes to win a divided election as they would to win a direct election. Which means your vote has the potential to be worth almost twice as much!

But what if you don’t live in one of the ten biggest states? That’s OK—those states almost always split between the major candidates, so that voters in other states also become crucial to winning the election.

It is true that under the Electoral College system, there are years when your vote doesn’t matter at all. But in the years that it does matter, it matters so much that, on average, you still come out ahead.

We recently put together a web exhibit to demonstrate this phenomenon. It includes an interactive calculator that allows you to change the voting populations of states and see how this affects voting power.

The exhibit is a simplified version of the work of Dr. Alan Natapoff, a physicist at MIT who first figured this out. You can find a nice summary of his work here,and an update here.

Tags : electoral college, voting, politics

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