The Electoral College and proportional representation. Every four years, United States citizens vote for a new president, but oddly enough, voters do not elect their Commander in Chief directly. The body that performs that task is an often-misunderstood entity called the Electoral College, through which each of the 50 states is allotted a specified number of electoral votes. On Election Day, each state tallies the votes for the presidential candidates and the states winner is declared. With the exceptions of Maine and Nebraska, all the states electoral votes are then given to the candidate who won the state. For example, Virginia is currently allotted 13 of the 538 total electoral votes. In 2016, Hillary Clinton carried the state of Virginia, so all of Virginias 13 electoral votes went to Clinton.

The number of electoral votes given to each state is equal to the states total representation in Congress (the number of House Representatives plus the two Senators that each state has). If this Congressional representation is unfamiliar to you, you may need to do some research, but the important aspect for our purposes is to understand that this setup creates great inequity in per capita representation from state to state. To illustrate this point, note that roughly 200,000 Washington, DC residents share a single electoral vote, whereas it takes over 600,000 Virginians to wield this same electoral power.

With Microsoft Excel as your tool, your goal is to compare the per capita representation for all 50 states. Electoral votes are recalculated and redistributed when the census occurs, once every ten years. Since the most recent census was in 2010, these population figures are populated in the file.

1. Write an excel formula to compute the ratio of population to electoral votes.
2. Use your results to answer the following questions (record them in your spreadsheet!!!):
   1. Which states voters have the strongest electoral power (smaller ratio)? Support your conclusion with data, computations, and an explanation.
   2. Which voters have the weakest (larger ratio)? Again, use data, computations, and an explanation.
   3. Many states will give all electoral votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote. Which states will presidential candidates campaign most in? Least in?

1 State ElectoralVotes Population 9 4898246 3 735720 7275070 11 6 55 3026412 39747267 5770545 3567871 9 7 3 975033 29 21646155 16 10627767 4 1416589 4 1790182 12700381 20 11 6718616 6 3167997 2 Alabama 3 Alaska 4 Arizona 5 Arkansas 6 California 7 Colorado 8 Conneticut 9 Delaware 10 Florida 11 Georgia 12 Hawaii 13 Idaho 14 Illinois 15 Indiana 16 lowa 17 Kansas 18 Kentucky 19 Louisiana 20 Maine 21 Maryland 22 Massachusetts 23 Michigan 24 Minnesota 25 Mississippi 26 Missouri 27 Montana 28 Nebraska 29 Nevada 30 New Hampshire 31 New Jersey 6 8 2910931 4484047 4652581 8 4 1342097 10 6062917 11 6939373 16 10020472 10 5655925 6 2987895 6147861 uw 6 1074532 1940919 6 3087025 4 1363852 14 8922547 5 2096034 29 19491339 15 10497741 3 18 7 760900 11718568 3948950 4245901 12813969 7 20 4 1056738 5147111 32 New Mexico 33 New York 34 North Carolina 35 North Dakota 36 Ohio 37 Oklahoma 38 Oregon 39 Pennsylvania 40 Rhode Island 41 South Carolina 42 South Dakota 43 Tennessee 44 Texas 45 Utah 46 Vermont 47 Virginia 48 Washington 49 West Virginia 50 Wisconsin 51 Wyoming 52 9 3 11 892631 38 6 3 3 13 6833793 29087070 3221610 627180 8571946 12 5 10 7666343 1791951 5832661 572381 3