So, I was kicking back the other day, just mulling things over, you know? And this thought popped into my head about how we pick the President. Specifically, those electoral votes. Most states are winner-take-all, right? The person who gets the most votes in that state, BAM, they get all the electoral votes.
And I started wondering, “Okay, what if that wasn’t the case? What if every single state decided to split their electoral votes?” Not just a couple of them, like Maine or Nebraska, but all of them. How would that shake things out? I got curious, real curious.
My Little Experiment Setup
So, I decided to do a bit of a practical exercise. Nothing too fancy, mind you. I’m not some data scientist with supercomputers. Just me, my curiosity, and a bit of time to poke around with some numbers.
First, I needed some raw material. I figured I’d look at how people generally vote in states. I didn’t go digging for super precise historical data for every election ever, but I got a general sense of how states tend to lean, you know, the rough percentages candidates get.
Then, I had to decide how these votes would be split. I thought, okay, let’s make it proportional. If a candidate gets 60% of the people’s votes in a state, they should get roughly 60% of that state’s electoral votes. Seemed like a straightforward way to run my little test.
The Nitty-Gritty: Going State by State
Alright, so I sat down and started going through it, state by imaginary state in my head, applying this new rule.
- Step 1: Grab a State. Pick any state, say it has 10 electoral votes.
- Step 2: Look at the Vote. Imagine in that state, Candidate A got 60% of the popular vote, and Candidate B got 40%.
- Step 3: Do the Split. Under my new “all states split” rule, Candidate A would get 6 electoral votes (60% of 10), and Candidate B would get 4 electoral votes (40% of 10). No more winner-take-all.
I did this kind of calculation for all the states. Obviously, in real life, you’d have fractions of electoral votes sometimes, and how to round those would be a whole other can of worms. For my little experiment, I just kept it simple, imagining it would work out cleanly or be rounded fairly.
It took a while, mentally going through each one, thinking about the typical vote shares. It wasn’t about predicting a specific election, but more about seeing the pattern change.
What I Noticed – The “Aha!” Moments
So after I crunched these hypothetical numbers, a few things jumped out at me.
First off, things got a whole lot tighter. No more massive landslides in the Electoral College just because someone won a bunch of big states by a thin margin. If you only won a state by 51%, you didn’t get ALL its votes, just a little over half.
Second, it felt like more states would be “in play.” Candidates would probably have to campaign more broadly. They couldn’t just focus on a few swing states if every vote in every state could translate directly into a share of electoral votes. Even if you were going to lose a state, getting 40% of the vote there would mean something more tangible in the electoral count.
Third, and this was interesting, the national popular vote winner would be much more likely to also be the Electoral College winner. Because if you’re getting, say, 52% of the votes nationwide, and those percentages are reflected in how electoral votes are split up in each state, it’s harder for weird outcomes to happen. It felt like it aligned things a bit more.
I also realized that some folks might argue about the exact method of splitting. Proportional is one way, but then there’s the district method like Maine and Nebraska use, where each congressional district gets its own vote, and then the statewide winner gets the two Senate electoral votes. That would be a whole different kind of split, probably with different results again. My little experiment just stuck to the straight-up proportional idea.
Wrapping Up My Thoughts
This was just a “what if” exercise I ran for myself, really. It wasn’t about saying this system is better or worse, just about exploring the mechanics. I found it pretty fascinating to see how changing one big rule could ripple through the whole thing.
It made me think that the way we count votes, the rules we use, they really do shape the outcome and how the whole game is played. It’s not just about who people vote for, but how those votes get translated into power.
Anyway, that was my little dive into the world of “what if all states split electoral votes.” Just a bit of mental gymnastics that kept me busy and thinking!
