So here’s to four years of non-specific ‘change’.\u00c2\u00a0 After a\u00c2\u00a0solid 18 months of tedious, blanket media coverage, Barack Obama finally beat John McCain in the U.S. Presidential Election, and will now be the youngest and blackest president in American history.\u00c2\u00a0 Obama has (at the time of writing) some 349 electoral votes to McCain’s 163 (and he only needed 270 to win).\u00c2\u00a0 This looks like a good two-thirds majority, but is it really?\u00c2\u00a0 Bear with me as we take a closer look at the statistics.\u00c2\u00a0 (Sorry, but my eldest was reading up on citizenship for his Scouts badge, so I was doing some research….)<\/p>\n
Obama clearly won the electoral vote<\/strong>.\u00c2\u00a0 But what exactly is the ‘electoral vote’?\u00c2\u00a0 Well, each state has a number of ‘electors’ which is calculated as the number of the senators the state has plus the number of representatives it has. Each state (but not DC or the territories) gets two senators, regardless of the population of the state (most populous: California with 36 million; least populous: Wyoming, with half a million).\u00c2\u00a0 Hardly proportional representation!\u00c2\u00a0 For the representatives, things are a little more balanced, with a fixed number of representatives being divided between all 50 states, depending on their individual populations.\u00c2\u00a0 This fixed number of representatives is set at 435, and was originally based on an apparently-arbritrary policy of “one representative per 30,000 people”.\u00c2\u00a0 This indeed equated to 435, for a population of 13 million, in 1789, but for today’s population of 300 million, there should in theory be 10,000 representatives.\u00c2\u00a0 Either that or we accept that each representative represents 650,000 people, which seems a little thin on the ground for representation.\u00c2\u00a0 Whatever.\u00c2\u00a0 At least it’s (more or less) proportional, so (for example) California gets 53\u00c2\u00a0representatives and Wyoming gets 3.\u00c2\u00a0 In addition, DC (the District of Columbia), which isn’t a State at all, gets given a number of\u00c2\u00a0representatives “equal to the number held by the least populous state”, so also gets 3 regardless of population.\u00c2\u00a0 On top of this, the territories of American Samoa, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico each get one vote, again, regardless of population.\u00c2\u00a0 Which means that DC, these four territories, and sparsely-populated states such as Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska and North Dakota have far more representation than they should statistically have.\u00c2\u00a0 For example, Wyoming, with a population of 522,000, gets the same number of votes (3) as Montana, which has – at 957,000 – twice the population of Wyoming.\u00c2\u00a0 And Mississippi gets only twice the number of votes (6) of Wyoming, despite having (at almost 3 million) six times the population!<\/p>\n So the allocation of electors to the states is flawed to begin with, being half bastardized proportionality (for the representatives) combined with fixed assignments (for the senate). But then this all gets knocked into a cocked hat by the fact that in 48 of the 50 states, the electoral vote is a ‘winner takes all’ competition, with whatever party gets the most voters statewide winning all of the electoral votes for that state.\u00c2\u00a0 So in California, 61% of people voted for Obama, but he gets all 53 of the Californian electoral votes, rather than 32 (61% of 53). (For completeness, in the remaining two states of Maine and Nebraska things are more complicated, with one vote being decided per congressional district and two by state.) Which completely negates any semblance of accurate representation that the original model had!<\/p>\n All of which means that the electoral vote is hardly a fair representation of popularity<\/em> (in its most literal sense).\u00c2\u00a0 For that, we need to look to the popular vote<\/strong>.\u00c2\u00a0 The popular vote looks at the number of individual people who voted.\u00c2\u00a0 Sadly, it doesn’t count for anything in the Presidential election (only the electoral vote does) but it is worth considering, nonetheless.\u00c2\u00a0 Now, Obama may have won 68% of the electoral vote, but he only won 52%<\/span> of the popular vote. Think about that.\u00c2\u00a0 On an individual basis, only 52% of the people who voted actually voted for Obama.\u00c2\u00a0 Not quite the two-thirds majority, is it?\u00c2\u00a0 But it gets worse.\u00c2\u00a0 This is 52% of the people who voted<\/strong>.\u00c2\u00a0 This election admittedly had record turnouts, but current estimates are that still only 60% of registered voters actually voted (maybe it would have been higher had people been able to text in their vote, as with American Idol<\/em>!).\u00c2\u00a0 Which means that only 31% (60% x 52%) of registered voters actually voted for Obama.\u00c2\u00a0 Or put another way, 69% of people who were able to vote did not vote for Obama.\u00c2\u00a0 Interesting.<\/p>\n Delving deeper, it’s worth noting that this is only taking into account registered voters<\/strong>.\u00c2\u00a0 The U.S. Constitution lets every U.S. citizen over 18 (except for those that have been convicted of a felony) vote.\u00c2\u00a0 According to the latest published government statistics, there are somewhere in the region of 220 million eligible voters in America (out of a population of more than 300 million).\u00c2\u00a0 Around 75% of these are actually registered to vote.\u00c2\u00a0 So let’s revise our figure again.\u00c2\u00a0 31% of registered voters voted for Obama.\u00c2\u00a0 Which means that only 23% (75% x 31%) of eligible voters<\/strong> voted for Obama.\u00c2\u00a0 So instead of having a two-thirds majority in favor of Obama if you accept the electoral votes numbers, we actually have a three-quarters majority against<\/span> Obama based on the number of people who could<\/em> have voted for him but presumably ‘chose’ not to (either by not registering to vote or by not turning up on voting day)!<\/p>\n Now, I’m not arguing that McCain should have won.\u00c2\u00a0 He had even less of the popular vote, and therefore an even smaller percentage of eligible voters voted for him, but the point is that Obama’s victory is not the whitewash being claimed.\u00c2\u00a0 Statistically, more people voted for no-one (121 million – 25% unregistered voters plus 40% of the registered voters who didn’t vote – out of 220 million eligible voters) rather than for either<\/span> of the candidates, so technically, no-one<\/span> should be President!\u00c2\u00a0 Still, I guess it’s better than Britain, which has a Prime Minister that no-one voted into that position at all…<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So here’s to four years of non-specific ‘change’.\u00c2\u00a0 After a\u00c2\u00a0solid 18 months of tedious, blanket media coverage, Barack Obama finally beat John McCain […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[60],"class_list":["post-126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":189,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126\/revisions\/189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}