block by almccon fcac19a6d82552438da8853abe2b51d1

2016 Electoral College

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Proportional symbols showing electoral votes by state.

Click on the map to show what the electoral votes would look like if we allocated electoral votes only according to the number of House seats, instead of House + Senate seats. This change would make the Electoral College votes would be roughly proportional to the states’ populations. The effect would be to subtract two electoral votes from each state.

Currently, Trump leads 306 to 232. If we subtract 2 votes from each candidate’s states, we get Trump 246, Clinton 190, so Trump would still win the Electoral College. Yes, voters in smaller states do have extra power in the Electoral College, but that is not what caused Trump’s win. The problem is that Clinton’s popular vote was too clustered in a smaller number of states, while Trump had smaller wins across a larger number of states.

Note, however, that in 2000 the over-weighting of small states was a problem. If we did the same adjustment for 2000, instead of Bush 271 vs Gore 266, we would have instead Bush 211 vs Gore 224.

2016 data from: https://github.com/Ryan-J-Smith/presidential_election_county_results_2016

forked from almccon‘s block: USA 2012 presidential election proportional circles

index.html

2012-electoral-college.csv