March Mania Day 24: Proportional Electoral College

Today's original March Mania post was supposed to be about my experience with Khan Academy and how I planned on being a completionist with the math mission, but recent events have convinced me to post something else instead. Some people in politics have been pushing for the abolition of the Electoral College in the United States recently. They advocate for one person equals one vote. I know the current system is flawed, but every system has its flaws, so I thought, why not manipulate too many numbers and figure out how a proportional Electoral College can work. My idea for a proportional EC is to have the EC votes allocated by percentages at the state level. Taking Maryland and the 2016 Election as an example: Clinton received 60.33% of Maryland's votes while Trump received 33.91% according to this nifty report: 2016 Federal Elections. There are weaknesses as already evidenced  by the fact that MD has 10 EC votes but Hillary and Trump rounded up only result in 9 votes while the third party candidates each did not receive enough votes to warrant one EC vote (.6033*10 = 6.033 rounding down to 6 for Clinton and .3391*10 = 3.391 rounding down to 3 for Trump). Apply to each state, then add up the resulting EC vote allocations. So far I find that it is much more challenging for any candidate to reach the 270 equals instant win threshold that is currently in place combined with my idea, so proportional EC may have to be bundled with the idea that instead of 270, that whoever has the most wins.

Anyways I'm not here to debate about the 2016 election and any attacks on me will not be tolerated. Instead I'm going to apply my idea to a more interesting election. Let's turn the clock back to 1912. There was Woodrow Wilson going against a fractured Republican base that was split between the incumbent president Taft and the progressive (at the time) Roosevelt. There were also socialists and a prohibitionist running, but they barely made a dent in the national scene.

The United States Presidential Election of 1912

A brief summary of the Electoral College in 1912 is as follows: New Mexico and Arizona were recently admitted as the 47th and 48th states in the Union bringing the total EC representation to 531 with the winning threshold being 266. The breakdown of the EC for 1912 is as follows:

Wilson (D): 435
Roosevelt (P, Bull Moose): 88
Taft (R, incumbent): 8

It appears as Wilson won in an absolute landslide eh? Well, the popular vote and proportional EC have something else to say.

The popular vote for these three candidates are as follows:

Wilson: 6,296,284
Roosevelt: 4,122,721
Taft: 3,486,242

Wilson's lead isn't as comfortable if results were determined by popular vote. Also the Republicans might have had a chance to keep the White House if Roosevelt and Taft didn't disagree so hard on issues that the Republican party base split.

With those statistics out of the way, I present my crazy idea of a proportional EC.

This is a snapshot of how I've been figuring out how many EC votes a candidate gets from each state

Each state is allocated a number of electoral votes based on Congressional Reapportionment that occurs after every Census. I do admit to using Wikipedia, but the source provided for the 1912 election results is available at 1912 Election Data, so if my numbers are off a bit, I'm sorry, but this is only an exercise in numbers crunching with a relevant political topic. Then I multiply the EC votes by the percentage of votes an individual candidate received and divided by 100. Each candidate's total EC votes were added up after each state's breakdown. With all 48 states calculated, the proportional Electoral College breakdown is as follows:

Wilson: 247

Roosevelt: 133

Taft: 114

Although the three candidates' EC votes don't add up to 531 (and nobody received 266 for a 1912 instant win) We see that Wilson wasn't as dominant as the actual EC seemed to indicate and that Taft got the short end of the stick with only 8 votes. If this post does not receive a lot of rage from my friends who love politics, maybe I'll go around the presidential elections of other years and apply my idea of proportional Electoral College to them. Sorry for the long post, but there was a lot of information to sift through.

I may make a part two later to see how well the fourth, fifth, and sixth parties would have fared in a proportional EC idea for this election.