{"id":366,"date":"2008-09-26T10:36:30","date_gmt":"2008-09-26T14:36:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/?p=366"},"modified":"2008-09-26T10:36:30","modified_gmt":"2008-09-26T14:36:30","slug":"another-look-at-or-and-us-presidential-elections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2008\/09\/26\/another-look-at-or-and-us-presidential-elections\/","title":{"rendered":"Another look at OR and US Presidential Elections"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Mike Sheppard of Michigan State has a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.msu.edu\/~sheppa28\/elections.html\">wonderful page<\/a> that answers the question:\u00a0 For each US Presidential Election, how few votes needed to change in order to reverse the result?\u00a0 Most of us remember that in Bush-Gore 2000, just a few hundred Floridians needed to change their vote (269 by the official count:\u00a0 I won&#8217;t get into the controversy on what the real number is (or even its sign!)) in order to give Florida to Gore who would then win the election.\u00a0 But I hadn&#8217;t known that in 1976, Ford would have beaten Carter if just 9246 people (in Ohio and Hawaii) changed their vote!\u00a0 The most one-sided election?\u00a0 McGovern would have needed more than 3 million vote changes to beat Nixon in 1972.<\/p>\n<p>Why is this operations research?\u00a0 The question of which states need to switch is nicely modeled in integer programming, so this problem makes a nice (minor) modeling challenge.<\/p>\n<p>You can also check out Mike&#8217;s use of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.msu.edu\/~sheppa28\/mcd.html\">linear programming to eat at McDonalds<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Tip of the hat to Greg Fulco for the pointer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mike Sheppard of Michigan State has a wonderful page that answers the question:\u00a0 For each US Presidential Election, how few votes needed to change in order to reverse the result?\u00a0 Most of us remember that in Bush-Gore 2000, just a few hundred Floridians needed to change their vote (269 by the official count:\u00a0 I won&#8217;t &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2008\/09\/26\/another-look-at-or-and-us-presidential-elections\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Another look at OR and US Presidential Elections&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-election"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}