Charles Petzold

One argument sometimes advanced in favor of the Electoral College is that if the voters happened to blunder and select someone who was clearly unfit, unsuitable, or unqualified to serve as President, the Electoral College could step in to override the people’s choice and choose a more appropriate candidate.

Then came 2016 to blow that theory to smithereens.

Another argument is that without the Electoral College, candidates would focus attention on just the highest-population states — because, you know, that’s where the people are — and ignore those states with fewer residents. Urban areas would get the most attention because 80% of the United States population live in urban areas.

But that doesn’t happen either. Many states — some large, some small — have historically consistent party allegiances. The state in which I live, for example, hasn’t selected a Republican Presidential candidate since 1984, and in many of the more recent elections, the Democratic candidate has gotten about 60% of my state’s vote.

Instead, candidates focus on states where the race is tightest, where a little more attention or money could tip it their way and snag all the electors. These are called swing states or battleground states.

Swing states are entirely an artifact of the Electoral College. The concept has no meaning outside of the perverse way that we choose our President. If instead we were to elect a President with a nationwide popular vote, there would be no such thing as a swing state. Vote tallies for each state would still be accumulated for analytical purposes, but they would have no legal meaning. States would no longer be colored red or blue to indicate what party got all that state’s electors. Each state would reveal its true colors as a range of political opinion.

What precisely is a swing state? Is there a way to quantify swing states, and can we then mathematically rank them to determine the swingiest of them all?

Traditionally, the closeness of a race is calculated by a margin between the votes for the Democratic and Republican candidates expressed as a percentage of the total number of votes:

Notice an absolute value is usually taken of the difference so the number is always positive. This margin can be calculated either after all the votes have been counted, or by polling before the election. A smaller number indicates a closer race.

But in the first and second of my blog entries on the Electoral College, I’ve been more interested in examining how the Electoral College affects the democratic ideal of one-person-one-vote. My preference is to analyze swing states by measuring the extent to which the individual voter has an electoral influence to turn an election.

Suppose a particular state has 8 electors, and the votes for two Presidential candidates are 1,000,000 and 1,000,001. In this case an individual voter can determine which candidate gets those 8 electors. If the state had 16 electors and the vote is 2,000,000 to 2,000,001, the individual voter has twice as much influence over the final outcome. If the vote were instead 2,000,010 to 2,000,091, then 10 votes would be necessary to tip the election, and the individual would have only 1/10th as much influence on the outcome.

This Electoral Influence (as I’ll call it) is therefore directly proportional to the number of a state’s electors and inversely proportional to the margin of votes between the two candidates:

To keep the results within a reasonable range, I’ve divided the vote margin by 1,000. Although I’m calling this number the Electoral Influence, it might also be called a Swing Factor. For each state, this formula measures how much influence a group of 1,000 voters has in bagging an elector for their candidate. The higher the number for a state, the greater an individual’s influence is in that state.

Of course, those voters don’t know exactly how much power they wield until the election is over and all the votes are counted. Without knowledge of that power, the voters are also unaware of how much responsibility they should be exercising.

The following table allows you to examine both the Percentage Margin and Electoral Influence for each state in the past six Presidential elections. My data sources are the Federal Elections summaries published by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) for the years 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020

You can select a year at the top of the table. The formulas for columns 6 and 8 are those I described earlier. Column 6 is the absolute value of the differences between columns 2 and 3, divided by column 5. The final column is the number of electors in column 7 divided by the absolute value of the difference between columns 2 and 3, divided by 1000. Although the Percentage Margin and Electoral Influence figures are absolute values, they are tinted blue or red to indicate whether the Democratic or Republican candidate won that state.

Initially the table is sorted alphabetically by state, but you can click the headings to sort the table by columns 6 or 8, either ascending or descending. Your sort preference continues to apply as you switch among election years.

Sorting by the final column is most revelatory. For example, in the 2020 election, Georgia ranks as the state with the lowest Percentage Margin (0.24%) and the highest Electoral Influence of 1.358. What this number means is that in Georgia in 2020, every 1000 voters had influence over 1.358 electoral votes. In contrast, the Electoral Influence of California voters in 2020 is only 0.011. The conclusion is simple but shocking:

Why should this be? It’s commonly said that “every vote matters,” but obviously how much your vote for President matters depends on what state you vote in. Why do we continue to pretend that it’s good for democracy that the greatest political influence is in those states that happen to be ideologically the most evenly divided and hence inherently unstable? To my mind, one big advantage of democracy — aside from the moral imperative of giving everyone a say in governance — is that it smooths down the rough edges of individual and group eccentricities. But swing states are all rough edges.

In the previous installment of this series of blog entries I demonstrated that in the 2016 and 2020 elections, third-party votes in three states — Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in 2016, and Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin in 2020 — had an inordinate influence on the outcome. These all qualify as swing states. Voting for a third-party candidate in a swing state is the height of folly, or — if your actual intent is to sow chaos — the height of nihilism.

Swing states tend to change from election to election, and can only be fully quantified after an election has occurred. But some states tend to be counted among swing states more often, while many others are not. In one sense, being a swing state is a chronic condition. To get a feel for this, I plotted each states Electoral Influence over the six Presidential elections from 2000 to 2020. The Electoral Influence scale is at the left. The states are listed at the right in order of average Electoral Influence for those six years:

This looks like a mess, of course. A couple values even go way off the chart! (In 2000, the Electoral Influence values for Florida and New Mexico were 46.555 and 13.661, respectively.) But if you pass your mouse pointer over the states at right, each state’s plot is highlighted with dots that show if the state leaned Democratic (blue) or Republican (red) in each election. The gradient-colored lines connecting the dots represent possible shifts between the two parties.

As you move the mouse further down the list, once you get down to Delaware, Alaska, and Maine, the states barely budge from the big cluster at the bottom and have consistent party majorities.

I began this exploration into the mathematics of the Electoral College because I had an inkling that it was undemocratic, and I was curious if I could quantify that. Quantification is an important part of knowledge. As the Scottish physicist William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) once wrote, “when you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.”

Now that I have a better understanding of the injustices of the Electoral College, I am more appalled than ever that we have allowed this institution to exist for so long. Everything that we extol about the ideals of democracy are violated by the Electoral College.

Knowing furthermore that it is unlikely that the Electoral College will ever to be replaced has made me feel very emotional about this whole project. The emotions don’t include rage, however. It’s mostly sadness but also a deep shame — a shame that the country in which I live should have such a despicable mechanism for choosing our chief executive.