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How Close Were US Presidential Elections?
Mike Sheppard writes "I'm a graduate student in Statistics at Michigan State University and spent some time analyzing past US presidential elections to determine how close they truly were. The mathematical procedures of Linear Programming and 0-1 Integer Programming were used to find the optimal solution to the question: 'What is the smallest number of total votes that need to be switched from one candidate to another, and from which states, to affect the outcome of the election?' Because of the way the popular and electoral votes interact, the outcome of the analysis had some surprising and intriguing results. For example, in 2004, 57,787 votes would have given us President Kerry; and in 2000, 269 votes would have given us President Gore. In all there have been 12 US Presidential elections that were decided by less than a 1% margin; meaning if less than 1% of the voters in certain states had changed their mind to the other candidate the outcome of the election would have been different."
As I understand the US system, it only matters to win the state, not the mayority of the votes in total over the whole country. Would be interesting to know, how close it gets there...
Please, enlighten me. Say you're in New Hampshire (where it's a literal deadheat -- McCain is only up .1% in the polls over Obama) and you're at the voting booth. Are you seriously saying that, instead of picking Obama or McCain (which would have a big impact over which candidate wins the state), you'd rather go with Bob Barr, Nader, or Mickey Mouse?
If you're in Texas or California, sure, feel free to throw away your vote on a third party. But if you don't understand how much it could impact your life, you might want to rethink the idea. After all, tens of thousands of Gore-leaning Floridians voted for their favorite third-party candidate in 2000 -- let's thank them for choosing third parties instead of one of the two who would actually WIN.
> given Obama's track record of generally being a bad guy
[citation needed]