Hurricane Sandy may have cost Obama 800,000 votes

Like many people, I had been thinking that we should abolish the electoral college and elect the president by direct vote. Probably with the ability to vote for several people, ranking them in order of preference, so that we could vote for a 3rd party candidate w/o helping someone we very much did not want to win, and ensure the winner got the majority vote w/o a runoff.

However, hurricane Sandy has made me re-think this. Many people were not able to vote because of effects of the storm. To be fair, we would have had extend the voting longer in those areas. But because of the electoral college, they had their normal influence, at least to the extent that those who were able to vote were representative of those who could not.

If we do keep the electoral college, I would want changes to make it fairer - do away with winner-take-all, and the disproportionate counting of smaller states. Go strictly to counting precincts. But then there would still be the problem of gerrymandering. Even though more votes went to elect Democrats to the U.S. House, more Republicans were elected because of states jiggering their districts.

So this article was very timely.

http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/11/08/15025845-hurricane-sandy-may-have-cost-obama-800000-votes?lite

By NBC’s Domenico Montanaro
Nov. 8, 2012

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour asserted this morning on NBC’s TODAY that “Hurricane Sandy saved Barack Obama’s presidency.”
Advertise | AdChoices

But did the president’s perceived leadership during the immediate aftermath of the storm really move 2.9 million votes? That’s highly unlikely.

In fact, Sandy may have actually cost the president 800,000 votes.

It’s difficult to quantify the tangible impact of the good scores the president received during the storm. But public polls before the storm largely proved to be similar to the actual results on Election Day.

In the days after the storm, First Read projected that in the counties most affected by the storm in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, the president could lose a net of 340,000 votes.

It wound up being about half that across the states, with a net-reduction of about 160,000 votes -- 200,000 in New York, 10,000 in Connecticut, 10,000 in Rhode Island. The president gained about 60,000 net votes in New Jersey, but it could have been higher, given the margin increase.

Obama held his margins in all those states, but with turnout down across all of them, the president got about 802,000 fewer votes than 2008 – 500,000 less in New York, 161,000 in New Jersey, 123,000 in Connecticut, and 18,000 in Rhode Island.