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- Newsgroups: sci.math
- Path: sparky!uunet!pmafire!mica.inel.gov!guinness!garnet.idbsu.edu!holmes
- From: holmes@garnet.idbsu.edu (Randall Holmes)
- Subject: Re: Electoral college (was Re: Bill Clinton and Complex Analysis : -))
- Message-ID: <1992Nov6.190025.16940@guinness.idbsu.edu>
- Sender: usenet@guinness.idbsu.edu (Usenet News mail)
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- Organization: Boise State University
- References: <9067@blue.cis.pitt.edu.UUCP> <1992Nov4.054813.20137@CSD-NewsHost.Stanford.EDU> <israel.720991427@unixg.ubc.ca>
- Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1992 19:00:25 GMT
- Lines: 46
-
- In article <israel.720991427@unixg.ubc.ca> israel@unixg.ubc.ca (Robert B. Israel) writes:
- >In <1992Nov4.054813.20137@CSD-NewsHost.Stanford.EDU> rivin@SAIL.Stanford.EDU (Igor Rivin) writes:
- >
- >>Does the electoral college actually help in fairness? I was under the
- >>impression that it was a purely political compromise to augment
- >>states' rights, so it would interesting if it actually serves an a
- >>posteriori purpose...
- >
- >Fairness is a very subjective term, but it may be of interest to note
- >that Perot received enough votes to give him an absolute majority of
- >the electoral college. You just have to rearrange the existing voters
- >(keeping national totals for each candidate fixed as well as total votes
- >in each state) so that he gets just over 1/3 the votes in each of a
- >set of states having just over half the electoral votes, and Bush and
- >Clinton each get just under 1/3 in those states. In the other states, he
- >needs no votes. In a system with electoral votes proportional to
- >voters, you thus need only about 1/6 of the total votes to get a
- >majority this way. Where it's not perfectly proportional, you can
- >get by with less if you pick the "over-represented" states. Exercise:
- >using the actual data, find the actual minimum number of votes needed.
- >
- >To get a plurality, rather than a majority, in the electoral college,
- >you just need about 1/9, rather than 1/6.
- >
- >This is not entirely a fanciful exercise. It could quite easily happen
- >that a candidate with fairly strong appeal in one half of the country and
- >little in the other would be elected despite finishing a poor third in
- >popular vote.
-
- Lincoln was elected with a rather small plurality for this reason, if
- I recall correctly. (He had the largest popular vote, but nothing
- like a majority).
-
- >
- >--
- >Robert Israel israel@math.ubc.ca
- >Department of Mathematics or israel@unixg.ubc.ca
- >University of British Columbia
- >Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Y4
-
-
- --
- The opinions expressed | --Sincerely,
- above are not the "official" | M. Randall Holmes
- opinions of any person | Math. Dept., Boise State Univ.
- or institution. | holmes@opal.idbsu.edu
-