Election Simulation
Using Excel
The
U.S. Presidential election is coming up. In this exhausting
primary season, it's interesting to consider an unusual aspect of
the general election in November. In our election system, the
people do not elect the President directly. Instead, the U.S.
Constitution specifies that the people in each State elect
"electors", who travel to Washington in December to actually elect
the President. Each State has a number of electors equal to the
sum of that state's Senate seats -- 2 in each state or 100 total
-- and House of Representatives seats -- the number varies with
the state's population and the national total is currently fixed
at 435. (The electors themselves are not necessarily the
Congressional representatives.) The District of Columbia does not
have full Congressional representation, but has 3 electors, as
though it had 2 Senators and 1 House member.
The total number of electors is thus
435+100+3=538. The candidate with at least 50%+1 or 269
electoral votes becomes President.
What makes this interesting is that in
each State, the total popular vote (the actual votes of the
voters in that State) is counted up, and the candidate with
the highest total receives all the electoral votes of that
State, not just a proportional number! This "winner takes
all" scheme seems strange to many people, but that's the way it
works. Because of this system, it is theoretically possible that
if the popular vote in several large states is very close, the
candidate with more popular votes nationally has fewer electoral
votes, and thus the "wrong" candidate is elected. This strange
outcome has happened exactly three times in U.S. history. Its
possibility shows you the importance of voting, because very few
votes can make a huge difference.
To see this, let's play a little game.
The file http://mikefeldman.us/csci1030/election-game-data.csv
contains a set of comma-separated state-by-state data for an
imaginary Presidential contest between Smith and Jones. You're
going to bring this data into Excel and analyze it. This is an
example of a spreadsheet being used for "what-if" analysis.
- Bring the data into Excel
- Save the result as an Excel file
- Add titles in Row 1 to these
columns:
- Sum of votes for Smith and Jones
(Col. E)
- Percent of total for Smith,
percent of total for Jones (Cols. F and G)
- Electoral votes for Smith,
electoral votes for Jones (Cols. H and I)
- Now use formulas in the cells of
Row 2 to compute the total votes and percentages for the first
State
- Use Fill Down to propagate the
calculations to all states
- Use an IF formula in Row 1 to
compute the electoral votes for Jones and Smith. For example,
the formula in H2 will be IF(C2>D2,B2,0), which gives
Alabama's electoral votes to whoever got more votes in that
State. Use Fill Down to propagate these computations to all
States.
- Now use Row 53 to sum all the votes
and electoral votes.
- Who wins the popular vote? Who wins
the electoral vote?
Now let's look at the effect of a few
large States voting the other way.
- Write down (on paper) the vote
totals for Smith and Jones, for California, Florida, and New
York.
- Now type those votes into their
respective States, but in each case, interchange Jones' and
Smith's votes.
- Now who wins the popular vote? Who
wins the electoral vote?
NOTE:
I originally assigned this simulation in October, 2000 -- one
month BEFORE the infamous, unusual, 2000 Presidential election,
in which George W. Bush won the Presidency. At the time, only
twice in US history -- 1876 and 1888 -- had the
popular-vote winner not won in the electoral college. This
simulation showed a theoretical possibility which had been
discussed by political scientists and pundits, but thought to be
unlikely. I never imagined that my little class exercise would
prove to be prophetic, and certainly not that Florida would be
the key state (as it is in this simulation) that gave Bush the
victory over Al Gore.
You might
want to learn more about the 2000 election, since you were
probably quite young when it took place. Wikipedia has a good
article on the 2000 election and the troubles in Florida, at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2000
and one on the "butterfly ballot" which was said to cause voting
problems in Florida, at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballot#Design
This is worth reading in view of our project topic.
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