How McCain Could Win With 22% of the Popular Vote
That's no typo.
Palo Alto-based systems analyst John Felleman, a student of electoral college quirks, has created a statistical scenario wherein a candidate is rejected by 78% of voters and still gains the Oval Office (see table 1, below).
"Granted, the vote distributions are a bit far-fetched," Felleman says. "But even more believable scenarios show how you can win the presidency by exploiting the electoral college."
Felleman shows (in table 2) how, with just 47% of the popular vote, John McCain could very well collect 271 electoral votes and win next Tuesday (victory requires a minimum of 270). Felleman has used current polling numbers with three plausible variables:
1) 30% of undecided voters vote McCain.
2) 3% of voters stating allegiance to Obama actually choose McCain in the voting booth.
3) McCain manages to outperform polls by 1% to 5% in Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Missouri, Colorado, Pennsylvania and Nevada.
Such an outcome would hardly be unprecedented. Remember Richard Nixon's demolition of Hubert Humphrey in 1968, 301 electoral votes to 191? In that election Nixon received 511,944 more popular votes than Humphrey, a margin of victory of less than one percent.
And then there was 2000, where (in the event you're new to Earth) the winning candidate received 543,816 less popular votes than the loser.
Felleman explains how the electoral college enables this: "A Wyoming voter has four times the influence that a California voter does on the outcome of the election. And voters in twelve states have a vote with at least twice the influence of a Texas, Florida or California voter." (See table 3)
1969's proposed Bay-Celler Amendment required the winning team to garner at least 40% of the popular vote. The measure died at the hands of small-state conservatives--Democrats as well as Republicans--who felt it would truncate their states' influence.
Had the founding fathers been equipped with PDAs with algorithmic calculation features to account for trends in modern population density and political dynamics, perhaps the Constitution would have offered a more balanced solution.
There's no time like the present to reflect on a system that allows a candidate to gain office regardless of the popular will.
The Huffington Post is officially open to proposed alternatives.
Follow Keith Thomson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/kqthomson
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I don't like the electoral college for many reasons but the 22 percent scenario is beyond far-fetched, it simply would never happen. Check 538.com for the odds of either candidate winning while losing the popular vote.
like most articles second-guessing the polls, what isn't included here is the 3% Nader vote and the 2% Barr vote. That's 5% not factored into analysis. That also reduces the "undecided voted to around2 % which is the margin of error. Once your "undetermined" is equal to the margin of error, statistically the principle percentages project into the "undetermined" ( i.e., 48% of that 2% will vote Obama, 44% for McCain, etc.). As to the threat of a "Bradley Effect," that is disproved by the fact that the polling numbers have been consistent over a long period of time - had the Bradley effect applied we would be seeing wild swings in response to differently phrased polls, but Obama's numbers have only dipped once, and polls on the issues have shown a steady increase for Obama.
Of course, there's no SStatistical approach to voter fraud as it happened in Florida 20000, Ohio 2004; however, Obama has pursued a "50 state" strategy that has complicated GOP plans of those kinds.
There's no doubt the electoral College stinks; and it's unclear how we can reform it. But the above picture of doom for this year is unconvincing.
OK - this entire thing is way over my head. BUT, if such a low percentage of the popular vote were to elect a President (and I believe you know with all those details though it scares me to death), would that not be cause to do something very serious and radical to our election system? I mean, would that not be a case for some revolt - it is revolting!
The Electoral college flaw that allows the canidate with fewer votes to win the election can be solved without amending the constitution. A Cal Berkley professor, whose name escapes me, came up with the way to do it. All you need to do is have enough states to guarantee an electoral college victory pass laws that allocate their electors to the canidate with the most votes nation wide. Once this is done then the canidate with the highest nation wide vote total automatically wins the election. Some states have already passed such laws, (I think New Jersey has). My own state of California passed such a law but our gonernor vetoed it. By the way, the law states that the new way of allocating electors doesn't go into effect until enough states have passed similar resolutions to guarantee that the winner of the popular vote nation wide is elected president. This is also constitutional because the constitution merely says that the state governments will dictate how the electors for thir state are chosen.
It's called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
Keith...man...what a buzz-kill.This is one of the reasons I've always hated math. (grin)
Unfortunately, I can easily see McCain winning this, of course, my view is from deep in the heart of red state TX.
Harris Co. may go blue this year, along with Dallas and Travis (Austin), so there is some hope
After Obama wins
and the Congress goes Dem.
Perhaps we can correct the "flaw" in the Constitution that prevents voters from actually electing their President themselves...
screw it - CAGE MATCH!!! Although then you'd be looking at an Obama-Palin White House till at least 2012, followed by Clinton-Baldwin.
And when are pundits going to stop talking about the 2000 election in terms that legitimise grand theft?
I agree with the electoral college since it is based on a democratic republic which is our federation of semi-independent states and matches with the congressional model. Two things I don't agree with are the winner-take-all model which disenfranchises voters in every state. I believe there should be a method of apportionment based on percentage of vote, or by congressional district with the two extra votes going for the popular vote winner in that state. The other point of disagreement is that the District of Columbia should only have one electoral vote since that matches their representation in congress; instead of giving them an equal footing with the smaller states. I think this greatly reduces the chance of popular vote differential with the electoral result, and would provide for a wider campaign instead of a focus in key states.
BTW, the primary system is a much bigger can of worms that really restricts the ability to choose a candidate based on nationwide support that allows for the continued dominance of the greatly flawed two party system.
Proportional allocation of electoral votes was the subject of a proposed constitutional amendment back in, I believe, the 1930s, called the Lodge-Gossett amendment. It never passed either house of Congress, as far as I know, probably because when people looked back at past elections it led to even worse results than the winner-take-all system, primarily because in the southern states the number of people who actually voted was quite low (since very few blacks, who were a large fraction of the population, were allowed to), but their electoral votes were proportional to their total population. The interesting election of 1896, when William Jennings Bryan carried every state west of the Mississippi and south of the Ohio-Potomac line, and William McKinley carried every state in the northeast, would have gone to Bryan even though McKinley had the largest popular vote margin in history up to that point. (That's in terms of absolute numbers, not percentage. Percentage-wise, there were three elections - Washington twice and Monroe once - where a candidate ran unopposed and got essentially 100% of the popular vote, but the overall population was much smaller then.)
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Thank you for sharing this and for the accompanying insights.
On a separate note, I don't know that a strictly proportional allocation is the answer, if only for the reasons you've touched on. I don't know what the answer is, but I suspect it's closer to the NFL's quarterback rating system, which takes multiple factors into account.
"Instant Run-Off Voting"
Voter ranks their choice.
It can get REALLY complicated, but I think that's the only way for a truly fair and just election.
Currently, if there are 3 nominees, and Nominee A is remarkably close in policy and ability to Nominee B, Nominee C actually gets an advantage for being out of step with what the majority of voters believe. That doesn't seem right at all.
I completely agree.
Direct popular vote election using ranked choice voting.
Every vote in the country would have equal value and California, New York and Texas voters, and all of the other "safe" states, would never be written off again.
That way the average,or the guy that nobody prefers, would always win...
I did have a feeling that is a possibility. Nobody here really understands the electoral college...
http://www.votesmarter2008.com
(Please spread them like butter...I talked to the producers and they've said they've had so many people tell them that they learned so much from the site, that they're trying to make it go viral ...)
According to Quantum Physics, it is possible that because a Super Great Depression hits all of the states except California, a massive migration to California occurs such that after the 2010 census the state is allocated 270 electoral votes. In 2012, a historical disaster hits California so only one person is able to vote. Palin wins California by a 1-0 count. Obama wins the rest of the nation 60,000,000-0. But because California is the only state that matters, Sarah Palin becomes the first female president.
Unlikely, but certainly possible. Disturbing, but possible.....
Proposal:
The Census Bureau conducts elections as three to six month-long remote anonymous tracking caucuses. People can vote by mail, phone, web, and/or designated location at any time during the long window and may change their vote as many times as they like while the window remains open. A live vote tally without any demographic data is maintained on the web and reported daily in the news media.
Instead of primaries and generals, races would be divided strategically into the phase before the caucus window opens and the phase during the caucus window. As front-runners emerge, voters who proudly registered their initial support for nonviable candidates have the option to subsequently register their preference among the favorites. As the caucus proceeds, the outcome will become increasingly certain, and when the window closes, the final results will be uncontroversial.
There is no minimum vote share for viability or victory. Voters can stick with nonviable candidates the whole way if they wish. The candidate with the plurality of votes when the window closes is the winner.
I'm sure the people who fixed the last two elections are counting these numbers. This seems the spookiest issue to me. By manipulating wins in a small number of states that produce the largest voter electoral college ratio, a fixed vote can be made to look believable. I don't think these guys have missed this ploy; they're not stupid.
I think the only hope here is that the folks that the powers that decide what the outcome of elections will be think Obama is the candidate that best serves their interests.
You forgot two elections where the winner gained the smallest percentages of popular votes in history. In 1992, Clinton won just 43% of the popular vote but earned 370 electorial votes (making your comment about Nixon's "demolition" of Humphrey with a paltry 301 electoral votes kind of a joke). Kennedy beat Nixon in 1960 by just over 100,000 votes, about one-tenth of 1 percent of total votes cast (303 electoral votes).
The president who won the smallest percentage of votes in history got just under 40% -- good old Abe Lincoln in 1860.
Clinton's numbers were skewed by Perot. If you consider 2/3rds of Perot voters likely would have stayed with Bush than Clinton wouldn;t have won in 1992...
Man... Imagine how bad off we'd be if Clinton hadn't FIXED the country before Bush II re-wrecked it...
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