Equation of States for Elections

Abstract

In the US 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama was elected as the 44th president of United States, winning the 53% of popular votes and 68% of electoral votes; in the election of 2000, Al Gore lost the election receiving 49 % of electoral votes, although he had more popular votes. It is generally believed that the electoral votes and the popular votes are correlated; however the detailed quantitative relationship for these two quantities is unclear. Here, we found an interesting relationship between fractions of electoral votes and fractions of popular votes in the presidential elections of the United States by examining the election results from 1932 to 2004. Moreover, this curve could provide an interesting explanation for the results of other elections that have taken place in Taiwan.