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Calculating the minimum number of votes needed to win the 2016 Electoral College
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| library(tidyverse) | |
| library(rvest) | |
| # scrape state votes from wikipedia table | |
| prez_wiki <- read_html("https://w.wiki/Zqi") | |
| vote_table <- prez_wiki %>% | |
| html_node(xpath = '//*[@id="mw-content-text"]/div[1]/div[40]/table') %>% | |
| html_table(fill = TRUE) %>% | |
| as_tibble(.name_repair = "unique") | |
| vote_table <- vote_table %>% | |
| # keep states, electoral college, votes | |
| select(state = 1, ec1 = 4, ec2 = 7, votes = Totalvotes) %>% | |
| slice(c(-1, -58, -59)) %>% # remove head and foot | |
| na_if("–") %>% | |
| unite(ec, starts_with("ec"), na.rm = TRUE) %>% | |
| mutate(across(2:3, parse_number)) %>% | |
| arrange(ec) %>% | |
| mutate(min_win = floor(votes/2 + 1)) | |
| write_csv(vote_table, "min-popvote.csv") | |
| min_states <- min(which(cumsum(vote_table$ec) > 270)) # 46 smallest contests | |
| min_votes <- sum(vote_table$min_win[1:min_states]) # 33,557,447 votes needed | |
| min_votes/sum(vote_table$votes) # 24.27% of votes cast |
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† At-large state votes