I was recently asked about a web-based interactive electoral college calculator. Such an application allows the visitor to dynamically color states “blue”, “red” (or “green”) to simulate various electoral college scenarios for one’s favorite candidate. I believe that this would be an excellent feature – one that could further be used in “what-if” scenarios of past elections. Unfortunately, I currently do not know how to implement such a feature. If you have knowlege in this area, please send me some tips.
In the meantime, there does exist an Electoral College Calculator at Gray Raven Ventures . This is an embedded java application. It loaded slowly on my machine, but once there was very responsive. It allows for four candidates (and they have chosen the media’s recent “standard” of blue for Democrats and red for Republicans). The map is a bit crude, but practical. It presently requires that one choose the state first, and then click on the party that you want to award its electoral votes to. This requires signficantly more clicks and mouse-movement to complete a scenario (a faster version would allow a user to choose a party and then fill all the states for that party). It also has an advanced feature to enter split electoral votes – if, for example, you would like to award one of Maine’s CDs to a different party from the statewide winner.
Perhaps the best feature is that you can manipulate this map to run “what-if” scenarios. On the left side is the ability to display the results from election (1789 through 2000). You may then change the winner of various states to see how this would have affected the outcome!
Update:Warning, This application locked my Netscape 7 browser and required me to reboot.
One way to speed things up when filling out “what if” scenarios is to copy a previous year’s results (using the “advanced features”). This way, you can fill out, say, the 2004 grid with the 2000 results and go from there.