by RightHandMan
John, Matt (from Conservative Hideout), and Steve (from motorcitytimes) have been blogging about an important issue regarding our Electoral College (EC) and the Progressive States Network’s (PSN) attempt to destroy it. It seems that the PSN’s have trolls running around posting in the comments sections at our conservative sites. While we invite the comments, I feel it is important to refute the outlandish lies that are being presented.
While every vote in a popular vote would count, I’m here to prove that every vote in the smaller states would count for less. I decided to compute the value the popular vote and the electoral vote for three small states (Montana, ND, and SD) compared to the value of three large states (California, NY, and Florida) from the 2008 presidential election. In order to calculate the electoral value I simply divided the state’s electoral vote (3 for each of the small states, 55 for California, 31 for NY, and 27 for Florida) by the total US electoral votes (538). In order to calculate the popular vote value I took the number of voters within each state divided by the total number of voters nationwide.
Here are the findings:
US Voters- 538 electoral votes
125,225,901 total voters
ND – 3 electoral votes
309,879 total voters
ND popular vote value = .24%
Electoral vote value = .56%
Montana – 3 electoral votes
476,041 total voters
Montana popular vote value = .38%
Electoral vote value = .56%
SD- 3 electoral votes
373,978 total voters
SD popular vote value = .29%
Electoral vote value = .56%
California- 55 electoral votes
13,286,254 total voters
California popular vote value = 10.6%
Electoral vote value = 10.2%
New York – 31 electoral votes
7,557,429 total voters
New York popular vote value = 6%
Electoral vote value = 5.7%
Florida – 27 electoral votes
8,327,698 total voters
Florida popular vote value = 6.6%
Electoral vote value = 5%
There you go. The numbers are plain, smaller states get more worth out of an electoral vote than they would out of a popular vote. If the EC was abolished in favor of the popular vote smaller states would pull even less weight in the election and therefore ignored even more by candidates. If the popular vote were the process of election, why would anyone leave the populations?
It took me less than 15 minutes to compute the numbers which makes one wonder; why haven’t the people at the PSN done the same? It isn’t rocket science. If they are all for the smaller states having more pull, why are they fighting for something that would hurt them in the name of saving them? Is there hidden agenda in here? I’ll leave that for you to decide.