Eeek. It’s a bitter pill, but I will agree. A majority of ALL the states shall be necessary.
Your answer that beat me by two minutes wins, IMHO.
ETA: You are correct in the previous post. One member per state is sufficient and abstentions aren’t necessary.
But, let’s say that I disagree and say that all is the smaller case all, and simply means all that are present. If the amendment mean truly all states, it would have the word “but” instead of “and” in “…two-thirds of the states, and a majority of…”
Can I appeal to the Supreme Court of Bricker et al. and get my 19 vote answer confirmed?
Well, I count it as one minute, but whatever. That makes my victory all the sweeter! I promise I won’t gloat about it too much.
ETA: are you flip-flopping and trying to steal away my victory? This shall not stand. I am the offended party, and I choose butterfly ballots at dawn.
I am flip-flopping. The “and vs. but” analysis is damning for your cause. Your aggression will not stand, sir, as it is against the constitution of my state and I shall now bow down to such barbarism 
*NOT bow down
What if I receive zero votes for President in each state, followed by getting zero such votes in the Electoral College, at which point the whole thing winds up in the House because no candidate got a majority. On a related note, the Senate is busily picking a VP: me.
As it happens, the House deadlocks, and inauguration day rolls around…
Gerald Ford got zero votes as president. He just required Nixon to resign.
AFAIK, that’s the way they calculate it. Except in North Dakota, which apparently does not have voter registration.
Sticking with this analysis, Maine and Nebraska can split their electoral votes. You have to win each of the congressional districts separately in those states to get all the electoral votes (the overall winner gets the two corresponding to the senate seats). 2 in Maine, 3 in Nebraska. You need a few more votes to get a clear 50% plus one victory in each of those districts to keep one of those electoral votes from slipping into your opponent’s column and making it a 269 to 269 tie.
His nomination to the vice presidency had to be confirmed by both houses of Congress, so that took 269 votes.
For someone to be elected President of the United States, they must have the votes of at least 270 electors.
These electors are voted by the people of the respective state, with each state having the same number of electors as members of Congress. For example, my state of Tennessee has 11 electors, which means that Tn. has 9 House Representitives and 2 senators.
The electors who gets the MOST VOTES are elected electors. These elected electors go to their respective capital cities in December to vote their choices. (The President is not elected in the first Tuesday in November every 4 years, they are elected the next month by the electors.)
As I said before, to “win a state” requires only that the candidate gets more votes than his challenger. It is possible to win states with less than 50% of the vote easily. This is a link from the election of 1968. You can scan your cursor over the state and see the results. For example:
http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/
Nixon won Tennessee with 37.85% of the vote. Even though 62.15% of the voters voted AGAINST Nixon, Nixon won all the 11 electoral votes. Wallace won Arkansas by 38% of the vote and won the state’s electoral votes. Nixon won the race with only 43% of the vote, although he won 56% of the electors.
Bill Clinton did not win the majority of the popular vote either time he ran for President. In 1992, he only won 43% of the vote, in 1996, he almost made a majority, but came up short at 49.2%.
There is nothing in the Constitution that requires an elector to have to vote for a particular candidate. Occasionally, an elector will be “faithless” and vote for someone else. In 1972, an elector from Virginia voted for the Libertarian Party ticket (and thus the first electoral vote to a female candidate who was running for the office of VP.
The electoral college is in my opinion, a screwball system that should be done away with or modified. It has worked reasonably well since the inception of the country. However, there has been disputed elections. 2000 for example. None on the 20th century, then the election of 1876 and 1824.
If the government really wants to keep this system, I would tinker with the formula. On election day, the people vote in their house district and vote for their elector. Instead of one candidate winning all the electors, split the electors up.
Several states are “top heavy” with large cities that basically decide elections, Illinois/Chicago. New York/NYC, even Nevada with Las Vegas are examples. Illinois and New York are actually conservative states whose votes “do not count” next to the voting clout of the urban areas. A better representation would be to split up the electors into seperate districts. The candidates, instead of barnstorming one state that is important, indeference to others out of reach or in the bag, the candidate will have to go to each individual place.
The person whom the House chooses must be in the top three, requiring at least 1 electoral vote.
That or just go with the simple and obvious solution you mentioned - eliminate the electoral college and have a direct national election for the Presidency. It would allow minority party voters - Republicans in predominantly Democratic states and Democrats in predominantly Republican states - to still effect the outcome of Presidential elections. Their votes wouldn’t be lost by being grouped and discarded at a statewide level.
Is someone allowed to be:
A member of the House of Representatives
An Electoral College member
A registered-to-vote citizen
All at the same time?
Awesome thread response. Props to Nemo for doing the math. Obviously it has turned into two questions since I left out some parameters, which is great. I’ll follow up with a more specific question:
What is the lowest percent of the popular vote needed to get 270 electoral votes? (basically win it “fair and square”)
Or if we flip it, what is the maximum percent of the popular vote possible that would result in less than 270 electoral votes?
On a side not I am also interested in knowing whether voter turnout is based on registered voters or the sum of people who are legally able to vote.
A member of the Elecotral College can not be an office holder. They can be a voter
Hello,
How many percentage? There isn’t an answer to that.
For a candidate to win a state, they have to win more votes than second place. A plurality. So, someone can win a state, or win an election with less than 10% of the vote, as long as they have more votes per state than their challengers.
Richard Nixon in 1968 and Bill Clinton in 1992 only won 43% of the vote, which means 57% of the voters voted for someone else. In the 1968 race, Gov. George Wallace, who was a Third Party Candidate ran strong in the south. He won a majority in Mississippi and Alabama, but only a plurality in Louisiana and Georgia. Likewise, Nixon only won 37% of the vote in Tennessee, but since Nixon garnered more votes than Humphrey or Wallace, he won all of Tennessee’s 11 electorial votes.
In the elections of 1968, 1992, 1996, and 2000, the winner of the election did not win the majority of the votes cast. In 1984, Walter Mondale did not win the majority of the voters of the one state he won in Minnesota, like all the other 49 he lost. He just won a plurality of votes.
In the election of 2004, Kerry lost the election to Bush by 120,000 votes in Ohio. If those 120,000 Ohioans voted for Kerry instead of Bush, Kerry would have won the election, even though he lost nationally by 3 million votes.
Basically about 45% of voters will vote Democratic or Republican, about 2% will vote third parties, which leaves about 8% independent voters. Now in some elections, one candidate and one party are more popular than the other, which will cause a bit of that 45% to defect the other way. Or what we have saw in ‘68, 92’, 96’ and 00’ that a number of voters will vote for a third party candidate.
I think that after 911, that the American people have taken voting a bit more seriously. In a lot of elections in the late 20th Century, about 50% of the people would turn out to an election. Let’s look at the 1984 election. Reagan won something like 55% of the vote. However, only 50% of the electorate went to the polls. Which means that Reagan only received the vote of about 28% of all eligiable voters. 28% voted for Reagan, about 20% voted for Mondale, while the other 52% stayed at home. Now granted, most people thought to themselves, “Fk it, Reagan is going to win, I am not going to waste my time with voting”, BUT, there were a lot of other candidates on the ballot who ended up with the same percentage of votes, a majority of the minority who cares.
I hope I cleared up some of your questions.
Let’s try it this way:
You need 270 votes to win. Electoral College = Senators (100) + Representatives (435) + 3 EC votes for DC = 538. Majority 538/2 = 269. Need 270
Minimum number of states to get 270 = 11
State = EC Votes (Voted in 2008) [needed to win state]
CA = 55 (13,561,900) [6,780,951]
TX = 34 (8,078,524) [4,039,263]
NY = 31 (7,640,643) [3,820,322]
FL = 27 (8,390,744) [4,195,373]
PA = 21 (5,996,229) [2,998,115]
IL = 21 (5,522,371) [2,761,186]
OH = 20 (5,708,350) [2,854,176]
MI = 17 (5,001,766) [2,500,884]
NC = 15 (4,312,395) [2,156,198]
GA = 15 (3,924,486) [1,962,244]
NJ = 15 (3,868,237) [1,934,119]
Total States 11
Total Electoral Votes 271
Total Number of votes 36,002,831
Total voters in 2008 election = 131,296,984
To win the 2008 election in a two person race, with least number of states and least amount of popular votes 36,002,831 or 27.42% of the popular vote
There are so many ways of answering this question it’s impossible to list them all.
You can already see it’s interesting that NY has more people than Florida but less number of voters for the 2008 election. Why? Probably 'cause NY was a solid Obama state, while Florida was sitting on the fence. So fewer people bothered to vote in New York state
Well, I guess if you had tens of thousands of candidates with roughly the same support, you could get a percentage of the popular vote that approaches zero.
As I stated in a post a while back. Winning the electoral vote by winning the least number of states is not the most efficient way to win the election in terms of popular vote. If you win the least populous states rather than the most populous states, you can win with fewer popular votes.
Basically the number of representatives is proportional to the population, but electoral votes equals number of representatives plus 2. You could pick up the almost the same 55 electoral votes that California has by winning
3: AK DC DL MT ND SD VT WY = 24 EV (8 Reps)
4: HI ID ME NH RI = 20 (10 reps)
5: NB NV = 10 (6 Reps)
These states have 24 Representatives to California’s 53 so they have less than half the total population.
This is assuming only two candidates getting any po9pular vote, which I think is the spirit of the OP’s question.