How Many Electoral Votes Does It Take To Become President?
October 19, 2008 by Curt Siters
If I were to run for president, I could do it very smart and target and win the minimum number of states required to win. This morning I sat down and actually figured it out. A Presidential Candidate needs to only win 11 states. 11! Can you imagine that?
Here is the list and the breakdown in descending order of electoral votes:
- 55 California
- 34 Texas
- 31 New York
- 27 Florida
- 21 Pennsylvania
- 21 Illinois
- 20 Ohio
- 17 Michigan
- 15 New Jersey
- 15 North Carolina
- 15 Georgia
These 11 states represent 271 electoral votes. In other words 20% of the states wield half the electoral votes.
Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, which have gotten a lot of attention in the last few Presidential Elections, represent about 1/4 of the Electoral Votes required for a person to become president.
I am not going to run for office. I am just saying. (In Washington Speak that means I might.)
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Curt Siters is an Independent Associate for Pre-Paid Legal Services, Inc. He is also aYoung Living Essential Oils Independent distributor and publishes articles on YourWebReference and at TheVeryEssence. He also does web work such as website design, website maintenance and SEO for websites.
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Comments
Tori, You are so welcome and thank you for the complements! If I get a couple dozen comments like yours I'll seriously consider it. Although I have been thinking about a series of articles on what my platform might be if I were to run. Who here would like a cabinet position? And what position would it be?
Curt Siters
I think that you are a very well safisticated man. You are very well mannered also, in my opinion i personaly think you should run for office. I can tell that your head would be in it, and that it would be your man focus during that time peroid. Thanks for your help. Your friend, Tori Martin.
Tori Martin
I really do not understand why we use the electoral college to elect our president anyway. All other elections are a pure popular vote, why not the single most important election we hold? Basically if you don't vote with the majority in your state, your vote does not count. Nobody wants to say that, but its true. Each state has a certain number of electoral votes varying between 3 and 55 depending on population (I think those numbers are accurate, but not entirely sure). Those votes, however are not split based on % popular vote. One candidate gets them all in each state. My state has 8 votes. Lets say one candidate wins the popular vote 50% to 48%, then that candidate gets all 8 electoral votes and the other gets none. That means its entirely possible to win the total popular vote but lose the election. Meaning the majority of Americans wanted you as president but because you lost in a few key states your opponent wins. Majority rules is the very intent of democracy! This also means in a state as populous as California potentially millions of votes don't count! Am I the only one who sees this system as flawed? By the way I DO NOT intend to discourage people from voting, you are not truly a citizen if you don't exercise this great right and duty we have here. Our country would cease to be a democracy if the people did not participate. I merely intend to point out what I believe to be a flawed system.
jason galloway