US Electoral College scenarios

[jeff_the_ashtray]

Hello, I have recently been wondering about this one particular problem. It's about presidential elections in the United States. For those not familiar with how they are conducted, here is how it goes:

For each of the fifty states there is a number of presidential electors assigned relative to the state's population. The lowest the number gets is 3. So, the smallest state (Wyoming) gets 3 electoral votes, while the largest (California) gets 55. By adding all the states' electoral votes up (plus the District of Columbia, which is not a state, but still gets 3 EV) we get 538.

During a presidential election the candidate who received the largest vote total in each respective state receives all of that state's electoral votes. In order to win the presidency, the candidate has to receive an absolute majority of electoral votes (that is 270 or more).
Here and here are the entire lists of states with the number of EV each receives.

My problem is this: how to predict every mathematically possible outcome of an Election Day? Is it possible for MS Excel to count and display every scenario that gets the sum beyond 270, or any other chosen threshold of electoral votes?

I welcome your thoughts.

Jeff

 

[galt13]

Why would you want to do something like that?

 

[shg]

Even assuming all states were winner-take-all, that's a lot of combinations to analyze.

 

[DeusXv]

You could use a combinations code like this one: Combination of numbers that sum or match a target value

And just plough through all the different scenarios, but even at that it would take forever to do. To be honest unless you can find someone else who has already done it or are willing to put a serious amount of time into it, I wouldn't even go near it, there are just way to many scenarios that could happen.

 

[newselection]

The Electoral College is a system in which each state is given a number of votes equal to the given state’s total Congressional representation.
http://www.newsnelection.com