The Magic Number

There is one number which is foremost on the minds of both candidates for President. It is not $700 billion, the amount of the recently-passed bailout of the financial system. Nor is it the budget deficit, the mean time between Biden gaffes, the tax rate, the number of houses John McCain owns, the number of Americans without medical insurance, or the number of months until we leave Iraq.

The number which dominates the thoughts of John McCain and BO is 270.

That is how many electoral votes are required to be elected President. Both campaigns are working the numbers every which way, trying to figure out how to piece together 270 Electoral College votes. 269 is not enough, and 271 is excessive.

"One man, one vote" is a central principle in democracy. You may be wondering how much weight your vote really carries. It seems that John McCain and BO are spending lots of time and advertising dollars in Ohio, Florida, Colorado, Indiana, Virginia, North Carolina, and Missouri, while here in Texas we have never seen either candidate. They have not been to California, New York, Illinois, or Arizona lately either. That is because McCain takes our vote for granted while BO has given up on it. The Electoral College (EC) system forces candidates to concentrate on states where the vote appears to be close. So the candidates are pouring money and time into the swing states, where those resources are most likely to pay off.

But the Electoral College tampers with the "one man, one vote" system in a different way.

Small states (when I refer to the "51 states", that includes DC, which counts as a state in the EC even though it is a district) get proportionally more EC votes per capita than larger states. The District of Columbia gets 3 votes in the electoral college decided by 588,292 citizens (I say "citizens" because that is the total population, not just eligible voters or actual voters). Each EC vote represents 196,097 citizens. California gets 55 EC votes decided by 36,553,215 citizens. Each vote represents 664,603 citizens. A vote in DC carries 3.3 times as much weight in the Electoral College as a vote in California.

In the unlikely event of a tie, when both candidates get 269 votes, the House of Representatives elects the President, but each state delegation gets one vote. So Alaska's 683,478 people have exactly as much clout as California's 36,553,215. This has never happened, but my analysis allows for it.

With the Electoral College, the swing states get the bulk of the attention. Without the Electoral College, the large urban areas where the bulk of the population is concentrated would get the majority of the attention. Small states and rural areas would be forgotten. There is no perfect system, but the Electoral College is certainly better than electing a president by popular vote.

It would be almost impossible to eliminate the Electoral College system, because that would require a Constitutional Amendment, which must be ratified by three fourths of the states, or 38 states. The smaller 25 states would lose influence with a popular vote, so they would surely not ratify such an amendment.

My point is not that the Electoral College is bad. I am just saying that it is important to understand how the EC affects the electoral process, and how your vote weighs differently than the vote of someone in some other state.

To quantify this, I did some analysis in which I used Monte Carlo simulation to determine the probability that each state would affect the outcome of the election. Using a state-or-the-art random number generator I assigned each of the 51 states a status either red or blue. Then I summed the electoral votes. If red had a majority, I looked for all the blue states which had enough electoral votes to flip the outcome to blue. I incremented the running tally for those states. If blue had a majority, I did the same for red states. In the case of a tie, every state, red or blue, could affect the outcome. Using a significant amount of computing horsepower, I repeated the process one hundred million times. This is rocket science applied to a real-world problem with world-history-altering ramifications, that you will not find anywhere but on this blog.

The results quantify the difference is the influence of each vote from one state to another. After normalizing the result, the final outcome indicates that one man in some states gets 0.7 votes and in other states gets 2.2 votes simply because of which state he lives in.



There are 26 states which have 7 or fewer electoral votes, making 7 the median influence in the EC. As expected, the normalized weight of a single vote in states with 7 votes is close to 1.0. Iowa, with 7 electoral votes, has a normalized weight of 0.97 per vote, very close to the average weight of the 51 states. Iowa is the only state in the union where one man gets one vote.

Below is the raw data for you to chew on. Column-by-column, an explanation for the data is:

1. The name of the state

2. How many votes that state gets in the EC

3. The state's population according to the most recent census (generally expect the voter turnout to be roughly one third of the population, because the population includes people not eligible to vote and those who simply don't vote, the 2/3 irresponsible, ignorant, apathetic majority. The 1/6 of the population who are under 18 have an excuse for being in this category. The adults... People who are not willing to be informed ought not to vote. It is well known that ignorant people base their voting decisions on which candidate is taller, which candidate as a more pleasing tone of voice, or which candidate is endorsed by Oprah. Thus, ignorant voters vote Democrat ten to one.)

4. The tally for the number of cases in 100 million in which that state altered the outcome of the EC vote.

5. The probability of that state altering the outcome of the EC vote. California changing from red to blue alters the margin of the EC vote by 110 votes, which changes the outcome in 47.5% of the cases. Alaska's 3 votes change the margin by 6 votes, which affects the outcome in only 2.27% of the cases.

6. The "weight" of each vote, or the "per capita" probability that each ballot alters the outcome of the EC vote. This is the probability that your vote is the one which alters the outcome of the election from John McCain to BO, or the probability that if you had voted the other way the other candidate would have won. These numbers are too small, on the order of one in 100 million, to easily understand their significance, so next we have...

7. The normalized weight of each vote. The normalization forces the average vote across the nation to be weighted as 1 vote. Normalized votes with weight more than one have more influence than the average vote. Those with weight less than one have less influence.

(For some reason you will have to scroll WAY down to reach the table)

State	EC votes	Population	Tally	P	PerCapita weight	Normalized Weight
California	55	36,553,215	47,504,902.00	0.475049	0.0000000129961	0.71289800
Texas	34	23,904,380	26,631,544.00	0.266315	0.0000000111409	0.61113000
New York	31	19,297,729	24,144,337.00	0.241443	0.0000000125115	0.68631500
Florida	27	18,251,243	20,874,019.00	0.20874	0.0000000114370	0.62737700
Illinois	21	12,852,548	16,103,665.00	0.161037	0.0000000125296	0.68730600
Pennsylvania	21	12,432,792	16,103,665.00	0.161037	0.0000000129526	0.71051100
Ohio	20	11,466,917	15,322,452.00	0.153225	0.0000000133623	0.73298700
Michigan	17	10,071,822	12,981,786.00	0.129818	0.0000000128892	0.70703500
Georgia	15	9,544,750	11,431,322.33	0.114313	0.0000000119766	0.65697200
North Carolina	15	9,061,032	11,431,322.33	0.114313	0.0000000126159	0.69204400
New Jersey	15	8,685,920	11,431,322.33	0.114313	0.0000000131608	0.72193000
Virginia	13	7,712,091	9,893,928.00	0.098939	0.0000000128291	0.70373800
Washington	11	6,468,424	8,359,528.00	0.083595	0.0000000129236	0.70892100
Massachusetts	12	6,449,755	9,124,030.00	0.09124	0.0000000141463	0.77599400
Indiana	11	6,345,289	8,359,528.00	0.083595	0.0000000131744	0.72267800
Arizona	10	6,337,755	7,595,333.50	0.075953	0.0000000119843	0.65739400
Tennessee	11	6,156,719	8,359,528.00	0.083595	0.0000000135779	0.74481300
Missouri	11	5,878,415	8,359,528.00	0.083595	0.0000000142207	0.78007500
Maryland	10	5,618,344	7,595,333.50	0.075953	0.0000000135188	0.74157200
Wisconsin	10	5,601,640	7,595,333.50	0.075953	0.0000000135591	0.74378300
Minnesota	10	5,197,621	7,595,333.50	0.075953	0.0000000146131	0.80159800
Colorado	9	4,861,515	6,831,295.33	0.068313	0.0000000140518	0.77080800
Alabama	9	4,627,851	6,831,295.33	0.068313	0.0000000147613	0.80972600
South Carolina	8	4,407,709	6,069,888.50	0.060699	0.0000000137711	0.75540900
Louisiana	9	4,293,204	6,831,295.33	0.068313	0.0000000159119	0.87284300
Kentucky	8	4,241,474	6,069,888.50	0.060699	0.0000000143108	0.78501600
Oregon	7	3,747,455	5,309,288.50	0.053093	0.0000000141677	0.77716700
Oklahoma	7	3,617,316	5,309,288.50	0.053093	0.0000000146774	0.80512700
Connecticut	7	3,502,309	5,309,288.50	0.053093	0.0000000151594	0.83156600
Iowa	7	2,988,046	5,309,288.50	0.053093	0.0000000177684	0.97468400
Mississippi	6	2,918,785	4,548,395.00	0.045484	0.0000000155832	0.85481200
Arkansas	6	2,834,797	4,548,395.00	0.045484	0.0000000160449	0.88013800
Kansas	6	2,775,997	4,548,395.00	0.045484	0.0000000163847	0.89878100
Utah	5	2,645,330	3,789,159.00	0.037892	0.0000000143240	0.78573800
Nevada	5	2,565,382	3,789,159.00	0.037892	0.0000000147703	0.81022500
New Mexico	5	1,969,915	3,789,159.00	0.037892	0.0000000192351	1.05514000
West Virginia	5	1,812,035	3,789,159.00	0.037892	0.0000000209111	1.14707300
Nebraska	5	1,774,571	3,789,159.00	0.037892	0.0000000213525	1.17128900
Idaho	4	1,499,402	3,029,352.20	0.030294	0.0000000202037	1.10827200
Maine	4	1,317,207	3,029,352.20	0.030294	0.0000000229983	1.26156700
New Hampshire	4	1,315,828	3,029,352.20	0.030294	0.0000000230224	1.26288900
Hawaii	4	1,283,388	3,029,352.20	0.030294	0.0000000236043	1.29481100
Rhode Island	4	1,057,832	3,029,352.20	0.030294	0.0000000286374	1.57089700
Montana	3	957,861	2,272,199.25	0.022722	0.0000000237216	1.30124300
Delaware	3	864,764	2,272,199.25	0.022722	0.0000000262754	1.44133000
South Dakota	3	796,214	2,272,199.25	0.022722	0.0000000285375	1.56542100
Alaska	3	683,478	2,272,199.25	0.022722	0.0000000332447	1.82362900
North Dakota	3	639,715	2,272,199.25	0.022722	0.0000000355189	1.94838400
Vermont	3	621,254	2,272,199.25	0.022722	0.0000000365744	2.00628100
DC	3	588,292	2,272,199.25	0.022722	0.0000000386237	2.11869300
Wyoming	3	522,830	2,272,199.25	0.022722	0.0000000434596	2.38396900