Simple question: we all know that George Bush won the presidency in 2000 despite losing the popular vote by a tiny sliver owing to the US electoral college. But he still got very nearly 50% of the popular vote. Last night I was wondering: what's the worst he could possibly do in 2004 and still get reelected?
Answer that question for me! (Okay, okay, I've already got the answer, but answer it again.) Given a listing of states where each line contains a state's postal code, the number of electoral votes that state has, and the number of voters in that state (note that I don't care about the format of this listing, so just choose something convenient) write a program that prints out the smallest percentage of the voting population that could vote for a candidate and have that candidate still win 270 electoral votes. (Assume that you need a majority of the votes in any given state to win that state, and that if you win any state you get all that state's electoral votes.)
Write those programs by Sunday and if there's enough interest I'll write a writeup on Tuesday. Okay?
For reference, here's a datafile of the US states (+ Washington DC, which counts as a state for election purposes) with their populations in thousands and their number of electoral votes.
; format: ((<state postal code> <state electoral votes> <state population in thousands>) ...)
(define state-populations
'((al 9 4631) (ak 3 700) (az 10 5230) (ar 6 2750) (ca 55 34441)
(co 9 4468) (ct 7 3317) (de 3 800) (dc 3 529) (fl 27 16279)
(ga 15 8413) (hi 4 1342) (id 4 1480) (il 21 12266) (in 11 6215)
(ia 7 2941) (ks 6 2761) (ky 8 4098) (la 9 4535) (me 4 1285)
(md 10 5467) (ma 12 6310) (mi 17 9763) (mn 10 5005) (ms 6 2908)
(mo 11 5718) (mt 3 1006) (ne 5 1761) (nv 3 2070) (nh 4 1281)
(nj 15 8392) (nm 5 2016) (ny 31 18250) (nc 15 8227) (nd 3 677)
(oh 20 11428) (ok 7 3491) (or 7 3613) (pa 21 12281) (ri 4 1012)
(sc 8 4033) (sd 3 810) (tn 11 5966) (tx 34 21486) (ut 5 2411)
(vt 3 638) (va 13 7324) (wa 11 6258) (wv 5 1849) (wi 10 5479)
(wy 3 568)))
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