Outdated Electoral College in Political Machine 2012?

Good catch.  It'll be patched in.  

Having said that . . the electoral college *IS* outdated and needs a revamp.

The electoral college doesn't need a revamp... it needs to be removed all together.

Yeah because that's what our Founding Fathers would want...

Most of them also owned slaves. They were *obviously* the people our entire country of 370 million should model itself after. /endsarcasm

Thanks for the catch.  This will be resolved in the first patch (still determining ETA on that).

Oh no! This makes my strategy of mainly focusing on CA, TX, NY, FL, PA, IL, and OH less effective! And-and... I'll have to pay attention to... GA...

What I'd like to see is the option to have the electoral college voting wieghts in each state dynamically changing as the game progesses.

When the founding fathers created the constitution they made it a living document because they knew it would need to be changed in the future. The electoral college is one of those things that does more harm than good now.

So, where did DC's electoral votes go? What happens in the game if there is a tie

The House elects the President (through a special process, not a floor vote) and then the Senate elects the Vice President. Well, that's how it is supposed to happen in real life anyway. And yea DC needs to be added.

I know how it works IRL, I'm asking about the game haha

...or we could just elect better Presidents.

Yeah, kind of like how we elected Al Gore but we see how that worked out.

I'm sorry you never got to see the second coming of FDR. Not that it was all that great the first time, in my opinion.

I think FDR was one of our best ever...also about the electoral college, it ensures states elect the president (states rights) but in order to change it we need a constitutional amendment which also falls under states rights and let them decide amendments, lol asking an entity to limit its power then they have no reason too LAWL...

It's all relative. After Lincoln and Washington the drop-off is pretty big.

So it's working as designed. What's your point?

If it's like PM2008, DC's Electoral College votes are assigned to Maryland.  

Maryland should have 10.  If Maryland has 13, then there's your answer.  

As far as the Electoral College is concerned, absolutely we keep it.     

The only change I would make to it is to have all of the states do the same thing Maine and Nebraska do, assign two "points" for the candidate who carries the popular vote of the state, and one "point" for carrying the popular vote in each congressional district.  

The entire reason for having it is based on our design.  We were designed to be more powerful at the local and state levels instead of the federal level.  If you scrapped the EC, you'd have basically NYC, LA, and Chicago dictating everything on the rest of the country.  The EC encourages candidates and/or parties to focus their attention on smaller states as well as larger ones.  We already know California and Texas are banked for each party, buy Ohio is in play.  But, so are states like Iowa and New Hampshire.  Why should their concerns be ignored.  

Yes, we are the only nation that does it this way, but so what?  Our design structure was unique to begin with, so what's wrong with being unique in how we elect the top office holder, too?   

What about states that are neither big or contested - do they not matter? 

How much attention will Utah or Vermont get in this election? Let's not pretend the electoral college somehow answers that problem. It just designates new important states that, yes, often are based on size. Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania - they're all electorally rich and contested states.

Hell, California was once considered the most important swing-state prior to it solidifying as a Democratic state. The only thing that's changed is that it's now not considered a swing-state, but if it still was, you and I both know each candidate would spend a considerable amount of time there trying to win its 55 electoral votes.

Yes, in theory, the electoral college brings more clout to smaller states - but it also discriminates against safe states. Obama, Romney, they're not going to be making campaign stops in Utah or Wyoming or Illinois or Tennessee because those states don't matter.

So, because the system is not about necessarily every state, you have a situation that arises where the focal point is on Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia. That's 9 states out of 50 - or 18%. Not exactly a system that favors the entire country.

When you get down to it, we still have a system in place that favors certain states and while those states might be smaller, their importance in any given election is greater than a solid majority of the country. 

Not to say just leaving it up to the popular vote is the answer - but that this fallacy the electoral college levels the playing field is just not true. It only levels it for a handful of states, while it also alienates a great deal of other states - big, medium or small.

Hi, I had noticed the electoral votes inaccuracy but I assumed that you'd just used your 2008 xml files or decided on it for gameplay reasons. I edited my xml files to compensate and its all sorted for me now.

I'm releasing a program in a few days that gives you easy access to the xml files with an easy interface. Super simple, but will allow people to change the game a little. 

You do raise a good point, but I still think the Electoral College really is the way to go.  

As I said before, if anything, I'd tweak the system to have all the states allot the EC votes to resemble what Maine and Nebraska do.  Have a candidate win 2 points for carrying that state's total popular vote, and they win 1 point for each congressional district they win the popular vote in. Granted, you'd still have states like Rhode Island, for example, that are still gonna be safe states for all available points, but it would add an interesting situation to states like California, Texas, and New York.  No longer are these three states "safe," because Republicans can win areas of these blue states, and Democrats can get areas in the big red states.  

It would demand candidates focus more time/energy/effort on more states, because you'd have purple districts in most states.  

Maine and Nebraska do it right.  

You'll never probably have a perfect system for electing a President in a nation with 300+ million people, but the popular vote would do more damage than anything else we can come up with.  

Just to weigh in to the debate. I'd have a proportional system, that doesn't require all the electoral seats of each state to go to the same party. Therefore you could have states that are split down the middle with votes, especially the battleground states. this would also mean that if you live in a safe seat of the opposite party, your vote isn't wasted.