Counting on My Fingers

[billroper]

But, hey, before I headed out, I decided to look at the nice map of electoral vote projections here. (The site's run by a Democratic partisan, but he gives an honest count, even if he doesn't have a clue about the Illinois Senatorial race. :) )

As of today, he's got the count at Kerry 280, Bush 238, with two states tied -- Colorado and Missouri. Then he talks about how, even if those states went to Bush, Kerry would still win, which is correct.

On the other hand, he's already spoken of how he doesn't believe the most recent poll that shows Kerry ahead in Tennessee. (It'd surprise me too, but I was surprised when Gore lost Tennessee in 2000, so what do I know?) And if you added those eleven electoral votes to Bush's total and took them away from Kerry's, you'd arrive at:

Kerry 269, Bush 269.

There's what I want for Christmas! An election being decided by the House of Representatives...

Comments

[tnatj.livejournal.com]

Ah! But by states in the House of Representatives.

And the VP slot chosen by the Senate.

The Republic would survive, I'm sure; but I wonder how long the Electoral College would.

[kevinnickerson.livejournal.com]

I hadn't realized you had such a sick and twisted bent.

I like it.

[drzarron.livejournal.com]

You beat me to it.. You're a Sick sick man, Roper.

Course watching that unfold would be the most entertaining thing to come out of this whiney election year.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

The election going to the House might be amusing for a few weeks, but then the country is stuck with 4 more years of Bush, since the new House being Republican by states is a foregone conclusion. Even if it pissed enough ordinary Americans off to actually get the Electoral College thrown out (and that's pretty unlikely), the price would be too high.

[scs-11.livejournal.com]

Hmmm...I guess that would be the sitting House, not the incoming House. Not that the house is likely to turn over, but it'd probably be closer with the incoming.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Yes. The sitting house. They're the ones in power when the decision has to be made.

B

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Turns out I'm wrong. It's the incoming house.

B

[billroper]

I had thought so, but hadn't gotten around to looking it up. Thanks for checking!

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

There is another site that watches state-wide polls and has a similar map; it's a site with a Republican slant. I stopped watching both sites when I noticed that they pretty much moved in lockstep.

B

[billroper]

From what I've seen, the only real difference between the two sites is that the Republican site tends to wait until two polls confirm that a state should shift categories. (At least, I think that's what he's doing...)

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think you're right.

That's probably the better way, though. There's a point where you're looking at the data too closely.

And I need to stop looking at it; sometimes the news makes me physically ill.

B

[smoooom.livejournal.com]

Being Canadian I really don't understand how a president is elected. I thought each person got to vote, so how can they tell a head of time what will happen? Is there a nice simple explanation somewhere?

[billroper]

Everyone gets to vote, but they are actually voting for "electors" who will cast the votes that their state gets (equal to the number of Representatives in the House, which is based on population, plus two for the number of Senators that each state has). So the popular vote for the nation as a whole is an interesting, but meaningless, number.

Since the vote is now chunky, having collapsed individual voters into their preferences by state, it's possible to look at the polls for the votes in each state and make some guesses about which candidate will get their electoral votes when the election is held.

Does this help?

[smoooom.livejournal.com]

Yes and No, Ok the polls I get, (we have them as well )

OK, so if I was living in the US I would get to vote for some one who would vote for who I wanted them to vote for?

Why not just one person one vote?

[billroper]

When the U.S. Constitution was being written, the founders were worried about the effects of an excess of democracy, so they put some buffers in. The Electoral College is one of those buffers. (The Senate used to be elected by the state legislatures until early in the 20th century when a Constitutional amendment introduced direct election of Senators.)

The electors are not required to vote for the candidate that they are pledged to, but they generally do and the results of an election have never been changed by a "rogue elector".

The other reason for the Electoral College is that it was part of the "Grand Compromise" that allowed the small states and the large states to form the Union. The smaller states were worried about being dominated by the larger states if everything were done on the basis of population alone. Thus, we have a proportional House, an equally-weighted Senate, and an Electoral College that is a bit less than proportional. :)

The other way you could look at the whole thing is: "We're just weird down here." :)

[smoooom.livejournal.com]

Ahhhhh, now I think I begin to understand. So who can become a member of the Electoral College, and how are THEY voted for?

(I hope you don't mind all the questions, I really would like to understand)

[billroper]

Not at all, although you're now heading out to the fringes of my knowledge. :)

In Illinois, at least, you don't vote for an elector, but for a slate of electors who are pledged to a candidate. Those electors are generally reliable members of the candidate's party, selected by the party leadership in the state. Their names don't even appear on the ballot.

The original idea behind the Electoral College was that people would vote for the electors who they thought would make a wise decision. As it turned out, that theory didn't take long to get holes blown in it. The election of 1800 was such a fiasco that they had to rearrange the system to make sure that never happened again.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Sure. It turns out the surveys are a remarkably accurace predictor of human behavior. Politicians have noticed this, and now poll continually--about everything. And the polls are actually accurate, so much so that a major discrepency is enough for peopel to suspect fraud (see the recent elections in Venezuela).

The problem is that the surveys--called polls when they're political; I'm not sure why--reflect opinion at the time they're taken, which at this point is two and a half months before the election. And a lot can happen between now and then.

B

[shsilver.livejournal.com]

I did send him a correction a few days ago about the manner in which the news of Jack Ryan's divorce came out and he had a change up within a few hours.