Jeff Parker

I live in Florida, a swing State, and evidently a swing County, Flagler. The News Journal, our local paper, recently reported an Associated Press pre-election analysis that points fingers at 106 communities in nine states. Bullseye, voters living in Flagler County got real influence.

Remember the Chad uproar of the 2000 Bush/Gore election, the nation held hostage for a month, while volunteers inspected ballot tickets.

Bush won 271 electoral votes, Gore 266, because of the twenty-five(2000 census) votes in question. Gore lost the election by 4 electoral votes. The chads spiced up the questionable  recount vote. Gore would have won 291 to Bush 246, so we know the significance  of Florida swinging.

Thirty states went to Bush; Gore, twenty; plus, the District of Columbia. However, Gore won the popular vote by five tenths of one percent, 50,999,897 to Bush, 50,456,002.

Does this make sense? Not to me either.

I went online to refresh my knowledge of the Electoral College, and by the way, there is no campus.

Each state is allocated a number of electoral votes equal to the number of members it has in the U.S. Congress.

The most recent Huffington Post   a “snapshot of where the presidential race stands based on hundreds of state-wide and national opinion polls, filtered through a poll tracking model and updated throughout the day.” On October 29th the polls  indicated the electoral vote distribution below:

Barack Obama  277

(217 Strong Obama + 60 Leans Obama)

Mitt Romney 206

(15 Leans Romney + 191Strong)