Please talk at me about electoral college votes..

I'm unsure about how our democratic system works..does MY vote actually count (read: matter) in the presidential election? The small bit of reading that I have done regarding this subject leaves me wondering.

Any thoughts? Thank you.

 

This depends what state you live in. For example, I live in Minnesota where we have 5 electoral votes. 273 are required to elect the president. Large electoral vote states like CA, NY, NJ, and TX will make the 5 in MN where I live insignificant by comparison, especially when my state has not voted for a Republican president since 1972. You should still vote, though, if you believe it is the right choice.

 

The electoral college system gives small states a disproportional level of representation. This is the result of the way that the Congress of the United States was developed. The number of electors each state contributes to the Electoral College is the same as the number of senators and representatives it sends to Congress. While the number of representatives from a state roughly depends on its population, every state has two senators, regardless of its population. Therefore, small states like Wyoming get two electors for their two senators, just the same as Texas does, regardless of the fact that Texas has a much larger population than Wyoming.

 

Sorry, but you have 10 electoral votes.

As for Lucy's question, maybe. Ask the people of Florida if their vote counted. In California, theoretically, one vote could mean 55 electoral votes. However, if you are in NY or MA and you vote Republican, you might as well go pound salt.

 

And here I was thinking your prime directive was to empower the small. Oh, well!

 

Consider this Lucy.... You can ALWAYS contribute to the popular vote.

FIVETHIRTYEIGHT | Would Al Gore Have Won in 2000 Without the Electoral College?

Would Al Gore Have Won in 2000 Without the Electoral College?
By NATE SILVER SEPTEMBER 20, 2011 7:35 PMSeptember 20, 2011 7:35 pm
George W. Bush won the Electoral College in 2000 following the recount in Florida. But Al Gore received more popular votes — about 540,000 more than Mr. Bush nationally, or about 0.5 percent of all votes cast across the country.

So Mr. Gore would have won the election if not for the Electoral College, right?

Actually, not so fast.

Presidential campaigns strive to maximize their chances of winning the Electoral College. They devote more resources — advertising dollars, field offices, candidate visits, and so forth — to states that might be decisive in determining its outcome.

We can see some tangible effects of this in 2008, when Barack Obama — who had much more money and much better field operations than John McCain — over-performed in swing states relative to non-competitive ones.

In the closing months of the campaign, the Obama campaign was concentrating its efforts in 15 states, plus the Second Congressional District of Nebraska (which awards one electoral vote to the candidate that wins it regardless of statewide results).

Nationally, Mr. Obama improved on John Kerry’s performance by a net of 9.7 percentage points. But in these swing states, he improved on Mr. Kerry’s numbers by an average of 13 points.


Mr. Obama’s gains were largest in smaller swing states, like Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Indiana and the Second Congressional District of Nebraska. Candidates can potentially get more bang for their buck in these states, which are cheaper to blanket with advertising and field offices. Smaller states tend also to be more idiosyncratic than their larger and more heterogeneous counterparts, allowing for a localized pitch to be more effective.

The political scientist Seth E. Masket has studied this issue in far more detail and come to a similar conclusion. Mr. Masket’s research went all the way down to the county level, comparing Mr. Obama’s vote in counties where his campaign had set up field offices to those where they hadn’t. Mr. Masket identified statistically significant effects; his research suggests, in fact, that Mr. Obama’s “ground game” may have allowed him to win three states (Indiana, North Carolina and Florida) that he otherwise would have lost.

The optimal strategy for winning the Electoral College, of course, is probably sub-optimal for maximizing one’s popular vote. There are diminishing marginal returns to campaign expenditures, particularly advertising dollars. Spending another $100,000 on advertising in New Hampshire — after you’ve already spent $5 million there — might sway (for instance) only 1,000 votes, since the state will already have been saturated with commercials. Spending the same $100,000 in Vermont might make a larger impact in the popular vote — perhaps 2,000 votes per $100,000 of spending.

If there hadn’t been an Electoral College, Mr. Obama would still have had his resource advantages over Mr. McCain — more money, more volunteers, and so forth. But he would have leveraged them in different ways, dispersing them more across the 50 states, with the goal of maximizing his share of the popular vote. Chances are that he would have won it by a slightly larger margin than the 7.3 points that he actually prevailed by.

There’s some further evidence of the way the Electoral College can distort popular vote results in the fact that swing states have notably higher turnout. Relative to their number of electoral votes, turnout is about 25 percent higher in swing states than in Democratic or Republican base states.



Now back to 2000. In that year, Mr. Bush was generally regarded as having the sorts of resource advantages that Mr. Obama had in 2008: more money, more volunteers, and better voter-targeting efforts.

Mr. Bush, evidently, deployed those resources efficiently from the standpoint of winning the Electoral College. But had there been no Electoral College, these advantages would have helped him to maximize his share of the popular vote instead.

Whether this would have been enough for him to close his 540,000 vote deficit with Mr. Gore is hard to say. But the Electoral College can cause significant enough distortions in turnout and strategy that this should be regarded as an unresolved question. The popular vote results that emerge from a universe like ours in which the Electoral College does exist are not quite the same as the ones we’d see in a world where it didn’t.

 

Pointless, clueless, and devoid of any coherent content, like practically all of your "contributions" to this site. I posted facts about how the Electoral College works. You are unable to dispute these facts, so you throw a dimwitted barb at me. Pathetic.

 

You mean kinda like you did;

Except that I showed you that you were the liar - from your own words

 

Oh, darn......I knew I made a mistake in the number of electors in my state. Thank you for the correction. By the way, Recusant explained the electoral college very well, so I give him credit for that. But you also have a valid observation in noticing his apparent disappointment with giving smaller populated states seemingly more representation.

 

One quality you are good at is providing lots of data, some of it is insightful, some of it could be questionable. Regardless, I still like to see what you post.

 

It is you who are lying again. My answer to the original question was to quote sources. If there was any dishonesty, it was in those sources. You then asked a different question, to which I once again quoted a source. Both times, my quotes were accurate, though I made an honest mistake in one attribution, which I later acknowledged. I quoted them in good faith, with no attempt at deception. You have dishonestly attempted to smear me for quoting sources. Your accusation may have some validity in regard to those sources; if so, you should aim it at them, rather than me. Your petty attempt at point-scoring is a complete failure.

 

I would say that most people don't have full understanding of the Electoral College, myself included. It's sort of a confusing concept to many people. It might even be sort of an outdated practice but it is what we are stuck with. It does tend to inflated the importance of the smaller population states.

 

What I am unclear about...what is it that allows the electoral college to 'vote'? I mean, could one vote be for candidate'A' and one vote be for candidate 'b' (for example)...or are they always for the same candidate? Who IS the electoral college comprised of? Could one of them be my neighbor, or your neighbors? Is the vote given based on anything (like numbers), or it be just that persons (whomever they might be) opinion? How is this person(s) selected? Or is it a computer generated vote? Someone tell me more! If my questions are confusing, they'll get better as I understand the process better. Something I read led me to believe that it is the electorates that actually make the decision.

I'm interested in the nuts and bolts!

Thank you all. I'm learning..

Ps..I wouldn't miss casting my vote. Ever since I attained legal age to do so, I have always taken pride in voting.

 

The most accurate way I can describe it is, additional to what Recusant said, is the "electorate" is made up of us citizens, in that, 500,000 people per state = 1 electoral vote. 500,000 people are what was agreed to by congress so as to properly represent "we the people", Each representative in congress represents 500,000 people of that state + each senator is also equivalent of 1 electoral point. Remember, this is politics, so it gets confusing and complicated for all of us. Ha, ha!

 

And does that one senator for X amount of people take the majority rule, or do they just do their own thing? I'm beginning to barely understand. How honest are they?

 

Interestingly, these electoral votes/points are more symbolic than anything else, because the populace in general constantly relocates to different districts, counties, and states. This is why congressors often redristrict i.e. gerimander.

 

Joe, Double likes for this informative post!

 

You mean like when you assigned a left wing quote to a right wing site? Or how about saying that the 9 Americans killed were killed at our embassy?

 

You are more or less correct in that approximately 565,000 is the average number of citizens represented by each elector in the Electoral College. However, to give the numbers behind my earlier example, "Wyoming has one 'elector' for every 177,556 people and Texas has one 'elector' for about every 715,499." That has changed somewhat since the linked piece was written, but not substantially.

There is a good concise overview of the Electoral College available here.

 

Pretty much all states have a winner take all system. That means that the presidential candidate that wins the popular vote in the state will get all of the Electoral College votes assigned to the state. Electors (potential members of the Electoral College) in each state are chosen by their respective parties: The Republican electors by the Republican party and the Democratic electors by the Democratic party. Usually they're some sort of state party functionary, but they cannot be a US Senator or Representative, nor can they be holding another important office in the government of the United States. In general there's nothing actually stopping an elector from voting for the presidential candidate from the opposing party, but they're chosen partly because of their demonstrated loyalty to their party.

Your questions are excellent. The "electorate" is the voting population, and they do make the decision by voting for their preferred candidate, though the fine print is that they're actually voting for the electors representing their party and state in the Electoral College. Check out the overview I already linked in my reply to Daniel Jones, and if there's anything that needs further clarification, I'll do my best to help.