Electoral vs Popular Vote

November 3, 2004 5:41 AM

As I understand it, the US election is won by winning areas and then counting up how many wins each person got. Give or take. It's not all that important to the question.

Does anyone know if/when the actual voter figures will be released? I'd love to compare this system to a true winner-takes-all system...
posted by twine42 to Law & Government (4 answers total)

they're available now - go to the individual area web pages or read them from the map details (links in the two long threads in the blue).
posted by andrew cooke at 5:44 AM on November 3, 2004

Yeah, if approximate numbers are fine, you can get them now. Official counts probably won't be out for a few weeks, as all those provisional ballots have to be evaluated one-by-one for validity. They won't get much (if any) press when they do come out, since they won't change the major results, but I'd look at the pages for the secretary of state for each individual state in a few weeks if you're interested.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 9:33 AM on November 3, 2004

twine42, for answering the more general question rather than the specific 2004 question, Dave Leip's Atlas of US Elections is a great source. Right now due to traffic most of the free content is offline, but you may want to pay anyway for access to the deep stuff.
posted by dhartung at 11:53 AM on November 3, 2004

The winner-takes-all system is called the popular vote, and as you are aware it's only relevant to electing a President in that the popular vote is generally in line with the election.

The three times that a President lost the popular vote but won the election were in 1876, (Rutherford B. Hayes lost the popular vote 4,036,298 to 4,300,590) 1888, (Benjamin Harrison lost the popular vote 5,439,853 to 5,540,309) and 2000 (George W. Bush lost the popular vote 50,999,897 to 50,456,002)
posted by revgeorge at 11:56 AM on November 3, 2004