I did an analysis on the popular vote versus the Electoral College vote. I’d love to share my spreadsheet with you all, so if someone can tell me the best way to make it available, I’d be happy to comply.
It seems to me there are 2 predominate schools of thought on the EC:
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The EC is necessary because otherwise the less populated areas won’t really count in Presidential elections.
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The EC is outdated. Why should the vote of a Kansas farmer count more than the vote of a Chicago factory worker?
The first analysis I did is one that I know has been done before – determine how many popular votes equate to one EC vote. I think the analyses I’ve seen before used registered voters. My analysis used actual voters, and shows that the range by state is 85,283 for Wyoming to 327,427 for Florida. (I was surprised it was Florida; I was expecting it to be a blue state). This means that a vote in Wyoming was “worth” almost 4 times as much as a vote in Florida.
The second analysis was a bit more interesting. I decided that maybe there is value in the EC system, but it’s too lopsided. What would happen if a state’s EC vote wasn’t Winner Takes All, but done proportionally? This would preserve some of the EC value, since a vote in Wyoming would still be worth almost 4 times as much as one in Florida, but swing states would be of less importance.
I had a bit of a problem with the numbers, since rounding error sometimes resulted in the total EC votes from a state not equaling their actual EC entitlement. I resolved this by removing third party and other candidates from the analysis, since none received any EC votes. In anyone has a better idea for handling this, please let me know.
At any rate, the result:
Clinton: 270
Trump: 268