SWING STATES and ELECTORAL VOTES

A Short Civics Lesson

(10 pm)  Someone asked me today, "Which are the 'swing' states?" I realized that I had put that list in my announcement email, but not in the blog.  So here it is (below): the list of 'swing' states, with their electoral vote count. 

SWING STATES
Some may have the question, "What IS a 'swing' state?"  In most states, a particular candidate is very likely (based on polls and history) to win that state and its electoral votes, and it would take an enormous effort to change that outcome.  But in some states, the polls are so close that the vote could 'swing' to either candidate, and that's where the campaigns' efforts are most likely to make a difference.  And which states are on that list will vary according to one's polling information, but there is general agreement on most lists.

Another question people often have (and I myself need to refresh my memory on this occasionally) is, "How does this Electoral College thing work anyway?"  So, I have created a fairly simple example and explanation below the list.

Swing States  Electoral votes
  Colo.         9
  Fla.         29             [for a map, click here]
  Iowa          6    

  Nev.          6
  N.H.          4
  N.C.         15         NON Swing-State Votes:  Obama:  237
  Ohio         18                                 Romney: 191
  Va.          13         Needed to win:  270
  Wis.         10
              ---
 Total        110 electoral votes

If you think that 9 states out of 50 (or 58 depending on who's counting) is putting too much power into too few hands, there are some writers who say that it's not 9 states that are swingable, but only 106 counties (Texas alone has 254 counties).  See the article here [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/21/2012-swing-states_n_1997680.html]  or here [http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/10/21/in_race_to_270_it_may_come_down_to_106_counties_115855.html].

For more info on swing states, just do a web search.   Besides Google, try Yahoo or Bing;  you get different results.  In fact, when you come back later to the same search engine and search for the same thing again, you'll often get different results!  That's due partly to the contents of the web changing by the second, but largely due to their spying on where you've been on the web and extrapolating what your interests are;  Big Brother is here (for the younger generations, that's from Orwell's book "1984").


How the ELECTORAL COLLEGE Works

It starts with Congress.
The total number of voting representatives is fixed by law at 435. Each U.S. state is represented in the House in proportion to its population but is entitled to at least one representative.  (Wikipedia  [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Representatives])  The most populous state, California, currently has 53 representatives according to GovTrack [http://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/CA] (Wiki is out of date).  The Senate has 100 members, 2 per state, regardless of population.

Electoral College
Each state is allotted a number of electors equal to its total voting membership of the U.S. Congress (number of Representatives plus its 2 Senators).  So the Electoral College has 538 electors, 435 based on states' Representatives and 100 based on their Senators, plus three electors from the District of Columbia.  (Wikipedia) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_%28United_States%29]

Electoral vote NOT equal to popular vote:
As a result, states with large populations have many more electors than less populous ones, but it is not exactly proportional.  Also, In most states, ALL of that state's electors are pledged to vote for the candidate that wins that state's popular vote.  So all of Florida's 29 electoral votes will go to the winner in that state, whether he wins by 1 vote or 100,000 votes.


A Simple Illustration (it may help to refer to this graphic):

Assume there are only 2 states, Acadia (with a population of 900,000) and Benovia (with a population of 100,000).  And say we have 1 Rep. per 100,000 population.  That gives Acadia 9 Representatives and 11 electoral votes (9 for its Reps + 2 for its Sen).  Benovia gets 1 Representative and 3 electoral votes (1 for its Rep + 2 for its Sen).

Now, let's say that in Acadia, Candidate #1 gets 440,000 votes (assuming that the entire population can vote, and does) and Candidate #2 gets 460,000 votes, winning Acadia with 51% of that states' votes (460,000 / 900,000).  And say that in Benovia, C#1 gets 90,000 votes and C#2 gets 10,000 votes, giving C#1 the win in Benovia with 90% of that states' votes (90,000 / 100,000).

So, the popular vote is: 
     C#1: 530,000 (440,000 in Acadia + 90,000 in Benovia) and
     C#2: 470,000 (460,000 in Acadia + 10,000 in Benovia); 
    that's 530,000 to 470,000; C#1 wins the popular vote by 60,000 votes,
          or 53% to 47%, a 6% lead .
However, the electoral vote is:
     C#1:   3 votes (0 from Acadia where he lost 49% to 51%,
                             and 3 from Benovia where he won 90% of the vote)
     C#2:  11 votes (all from Acadia where he won 51% of the vote)
      that's 3 to 11; C#2 wins the electoral vote, and the "lop-sided" election ! 

Admittedly, this is an extreme example, but it shows how the electoral system works, and it also shows its reason for creation.  The Framers designed the Congress to help protect the less populous states by making it bicameral (2 houses) with one house (the House) based on population and the other (the Senate) with each state equal (2 Senators per state).  They designed the electoral system on the same principal - to protect the small states.

In our example, the small state of Benovia has 21% of the electoral vote (3 votes of the 14 total).  If the election was determined by popular vote only, Benovia would get only 10% of the vote (100,000 votes of the 1,000,000 total).  That's over TWICE the influence they would have if popular vote were used instead of the electoral process.

As you can see in our example, the 20,000 additional votes for C#2 in Acadia over-ruled the 80,000 additional votes for C#1 in Benovia.  That seems unfair, and is one reason for a lot of controversy over this system.  Still, the system does give a significant boost to the smaller states, even though it wasn't enough here to counter-balance the much larger state.  If we had chosen different numbers for our example, we could have illustrated that. 

Technically, an electoral college tie is possible (269 to 269).  In that case, the House chooses the President and the Senate chooses the V.P. (U.S. Constitution, Art. II, Sect. 1, as modified by the 12th Amendment).  Since the current House is controlled by the GOP and the Senate by the Democrats, theoretically we could end up with Romney as President and Biden as V.P.!

By the way, the Politico site [http://www.politico.com/2012-election/swing-state/#swingCustom] has an option to customize the swing state winners and see the results in the electoral vote total.  And a good project for someone (a student in math or government class?) would be to develop (or locate on the web) a spreadsheet that would allow us to plug in different values in a scenario to illustrate the effect of varying votes, populations, and representation rates on the outcome.  This might be also used to develop a tweak to the system to make the small-state influence fairer (but what's fair???).  And the fair issue might be a good project for a class in debate or sociology!  Not a trivial pursuit.

Hope this helps.  P.S.  My wife and I have already caught several gross factual errors in this post.  If we still missed some, please let us know so I can correct the post for future readers.

Thanks,
"Thatch"