okayI made a small error in my recent post about the Electoral College. I wrote:
If 137,000 people had voted the other way in Ohio, John Kerry would be the President-elect, despite losing the national popular vote by 3.5 million votes.
And that's true, but it understates how close President Bush came to losing. Since Ohio is a winner-take-all state, Kerry would have needed to pick up only 69,000 votes to win Ohio's 20 electoral votes and thus the election. He would have lost the national popular vote by 3.4 million votes but won the Electoral College by two. That's two votes, not two percent.
Of course, if the margin of victory in Ohio had been that narrow, the entire state would now be covered two inches deep in legal briefs from the countless lawsuits the GOP would have filed, and we wouldn't yet know who had won the election. So maybe it's just as well Bush won.
By the way, I'm using a new icon for this post. It's adapted from this photo, which is part of the Chicago Sun-Times's "Real Chicago" photography collection.
