Cool electoral college calculators

No matter how many popular votes a candidate gets, he needs more electoral votes to win the presidency, a fact that the 2000 race made all too clear. This time around a number of sites have put together fantastic interactive features to help readers better understand the electoral process and select which candidate is likely to come out on top in electoral votes.

Here's a look at some of the more innovative and useful sites:

Electoral Vote Predictor 2004
This site tracks who is likely to win the most electoral votes -- and thus the election -- based on the latest state-by-state polls. As new state polls are released, the maps, spreadsheets, tables, graphs, and movies are updated. The site is run by a Kerry supporter, but the site shows no indications of bias -- at times Kerry has been in front, and at times Kerry. A very useful site packed with tons of data.

Boston.com Electoral Vote Tracker
Boston.com offers an interactive map that looks at the battleground states. The states leaning to Bush and Kerry are marked -- it's up to you to decide who you think will win the tossup states. As you select your picks, the electoral vote totals increase until you have picked your winner. In a nice touch, it includes audio analysis from Boston Globe reporter Patrick Healy.

270towin.com
Another site focusing on the electoral vote, this one offers an interactive map that lets users project of how each state will vote and manipulate outcomes in each state to view possible national outcomes for the election. The site also includes election results from every presidential race since the first one in 1789. You can also save the results of your predictions for 2004 and adjust next time you return. For those who get really into this, there's a downloadable desktop version. The site is offered as a public service by the creators of myrateplan.com.

PowerReporting.com Electoral college calculator
PowerReporting.com's Bill Dedman offers an electoral college calculator that also let's you try different scenarios in Excel. You change the winner of any state, and the electoral math changes along with you. There are fancier ones on the Web, but this one shows actual votes from 2000 and the winners in each state in 2000 and 1996, and battleground states are marked.

WSJ Electoral College Calculator
Another calculator that lets users pick the states they think each candidate will win and adds up electoral votes. This one is Web based and offers an easy way to analyze past data to see how states historically have voted -- Shift-Click a state to view both a state's past election returns (1980 - 2000) and the outlook for this year's election. You can use this information to try to predict the winning party for each state in 2004.

Latimes.com's electoral vote tracker
One of the first ones, which CyberJournalist.net reported on earlier this year in this post, the latimes.com's vote tracker combines the best of both concepts, letting you see who's ahead in the latest polls in each state by mousing over the states, and then select who you think will win state-by-state. The package also links to a Flash map from their Tribune colleages at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel showing the complete history of results for U.S. presidential elections.

October 28, 2004 | BY JONATHAN DUBE