Plunk Everyone

With the recent US Presidential election wrapping up this week, it seems like a good time to reflect on our system of electing the President.  Lots of people have criticized the Electoral College system we use for various reasons, like that it makes some states more important than others and is less reflective of the nation as a whole and… whatever.

My problem with the electoral college is not that it exists, but that it allocates votes to each state based on their population.  Why do it that way, when we could allocate electoral votes based on how many times batters born in each state were hit by pitches?  Wouldn’t we all be better off that way? Wouldn’t that make a lot more sense?  Wouldn’t that be more fair?

The only thing I haven’t decided yet is whether the HBP count should be based on just the election year, or the four year total since the last election.  However, it turns out not to matter, as you’ll see below.  Based on the election results, and the new HBP based electoral votes by state, the result of this election would have been the same.  (It also would end up the same as how it actually turned out – the one year HBP totals method would give President Obama 63% of the electoral vote, and the 4 year HBP total method would give him 65%).

Here are the HBP counts by state, for determining electoral votes under my new method:

You might notice that under this new method, if we just use the current year plunk totals, several states would not get to take part in choosing the president. My response to that is maybe they should have thought of that before they didn’t get hit by any pitches. Even under the four year plan, Massachusetts and West Virginia would get no say in the election because no one born in Massachusetts has been hit by a pitch since Matt Antonelli on Sept 28, 2008, and no West Virginia born batter has taken a plunk since J.R. House on Sept 30, 2007.

The other potential problem I see with this method is that it still makes everything hinge on Florida.  Under the 1 year HBP method, President Obama would have lost if Florida had gone to Romney, but he still would have won under the 4 year totals with 52% of electoral votes.

I think I’m leaning toward the 4 year method.  If we went by the results of the election year only, teams might be flooded with super-PAC money to sign one year deals with retired players like Craig Biggio and David Eckstein to stack the electoral votes for particular states (Biggio for New York, Eckstein for Florida, Kendall for California, Don Baylor for Texas), while opposing super-PACs would be driving up the price of non-plunk-throwing pitchers like Yovani Gallardo to try to make sure fewer batters got hit.  The four year method would reduce the disruption of the election cycle on the game.  But I’m open to other compromises.