Maine and Nebraska can divide their electoral votes. The 2 “Senate votes” go to whoever wins the state majority while the “House votes” go to who won the majority in the respective congressional districts. This year it didn’t matter in these two states but it has in the past.
What if all the states did this? Has anyone analyzed this scenario in this week’s election?
In the states with three electoral votes (VT, WY, ND, SD etc.), there would be no change.
Kerry would take electoral votes from Bush and Bush would take electoral votes from Kerry.
My initial suspicion would be that Bush would win an even bigger piece of the electoral vote. That would be based on the counties that Bush won nationwide but I don’t know how the all 435 districts are drawn…
I believe that this has been answered before, but if you apportioned the electors nationwide on the Maine/Nebraska model, you would likely get a higher total for Bush.
Because he won more total states
Because the campaign wasn’t conducted along those lines, so the totals would be deceptive.
There were whole states that the candidates wrote off because they knew they couldn’t win, such as California. But Bush would have won a bunch of Congressional districts in California.
We won’t know until somebody takes the time to tabulate the results by Congressional district. (We don’t even know who won Iowa yet!) As this site explains, this is not a trivial task. The linked site should have the district data when they become available. Then you have to add the statewide and DC votes. For the 2000 election, Bush would have won 288 to 250.
Them morning after the election I made a spreadsheet assuming the EC was split and came up with almost exactly what SmackFu did, 278 to 260 - didn’t bother with the third party candidates.
Then I made the decision that it would be more reasonable to give the state’s winner one vote and split the remainder. The results were 277 to 261.
It seems to me that doing this would have had us see the candidates spend at least some time in states they knew they’d lose just to make sure they got something. The big five states would see more action. My guess is that Kerry spent little time in Texas as there was no reasonable expectation of his winning. But under the the split vote it would have gone 21 to 13.
Kerry did pitch a shutout in DC, 3-0. That was the only one.
Me too (CA). Also, since we’re on the left coast, some people see the news that CA doesn’t matter in the Presidential race and so do not vote. They then miss out on voting for other things, especially the damn ballot initiatives which keep getting longer and longer. (Rant on this later.)
I had no idea that Nebraska and Maine could do that, though I knew Colorado was attempting it. Would Colorado’s decision be struck down as against Federal election law if it had passed?
Colorado was attempting to do something different than what Maine and Nebraska do. Maine and Nebraska assign votes to the winner of each district, with two reserved for the statewide winner. Colorado was proposing to assign its entire vote proportionally based on the statewide vote, with a complicated algorithm to correct for rounding error.
Probably not. The Constitution empowers each state legislature to determine how electors are chosen within its state. The most salient ground for a challenge to the Colorado law would have been that it would have taken action by popular initiative rather than by legislative vote. However, the Supreme Court has allowed similar action with respect to Congressional redistricting despite the fact that the Constitution also reserves Congressional distrciting to state legislatures.
The most problematic aspect of the Colorado initiative was its attempt to apply its rules concurrently to this year’s election. However, since it didn’t pass, we don’t have to worry about this.