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

[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.