Electoral Math: Hillary May Have Won After All!

                So Hillary supporters got quite a shock yesterday, not so much because she lost an election in which she had widely been considered to be a shoo-in, but because all the many polls and indicators which showed that she would almost certainly win turned out to be quite completely wrong.  Or were they?

                I supposed that what personally shocked me the most was the rush to call the election before the really tight races were completely counted.  I had never seen this happen in a presidential election before.  There had always been one of two labels applied to each state:  Winner for those where the margins were wide, and Projected Winner for those where the margins were narrower but still considered mathematically impossible to overcome.  Last night, there was a third category:  Likely Winner, for states where the margins were razor thin but were simply ever so slightly leaning one way or another.  With the pressure on to call the election, states like my own Michigan that had all evening been labeled “Too Close To Call” (and continue to be labeled as such at this writing) were suddenly shifted into the Likely Winner column for the sake of being able to name a new President, even though the votes were not yet in. 

                I had never seen this happen before.  Hillary Clinton had won the election in the popular vote by over 200,000 votes.  That was twice the margin JFK had over Nixon in 1960 and about the same that Gore had over Bush in 2000.  Yes, it is indeed mathematically possible, however unlikely, for a candidate to win the Electoral College but lose the popular vote.  But last night’s unprecedented rush to judgment raised a very interesting question.  Let’s take each of those very tight races that were deemed “Likely” to go to Trump and assume that on closer examination that they had gone to Hillary instead.  Would it have made a difference?

                Examining the New York Times live electoral map from just a few minutes ago, the answer is a resounding yes.  The following chart clearly shows that Hillary may indeed have legitimately won this election. 

ElectoralMap2016				9-Nov-16
				7:12 PM
	Electoral College Math 2016
	Hillary	Trump
	228	279
	59.8 M	59.6 M
Too Close/Trump
MI	16	-16
AZ	11	-11
47/48 Trump
FL	29	-29
PA	20	-20
WI	10	-10
Net Electoral Votes	314	193

As is clearly shown, putting the “Too Close to Call” column into Hillary’s camp would have put her at 255 and knocked Trump down to 252, not enough for either to declare victory but certainly a much closer reflection of the popular vote.  Now make the assumption that the three other razor thin states that were within one percent and did go decisively to Trump, got recounted (as is required in Florida) and the recount favored Hillary this time.  Now Hillary is way over 270 and Trump way under.  If there’s any chance that this actually happened, then Hillary won. 

                So my real shock is that the election was called before the final vote was completely counted and validated by a recount.  It’s possible she still won.  If the “Too Close” states turn out to favor Clinton, and Florida alone does a recount and finds a Clinton win (not to mention Pennsylvania), then she will have won and we will have a very interesting situation on our hands.  (Unlikely you say?  Isn’t that exactly what they were saying about Trump all last night before it became the reality?) 

What exactly could happen?  She has conceded.  Obama himself has officially recognized Trump’s victory.  This is unprecedented, a victor being declared before we’re absolutely certain.   David Stern, I don’t know anybody who knows more about politics than your wife.  Can you ask her if she has any idea how such a situation might be handled? 

I apologize for boring everyone with this math puzzle but I thought it was just too interesting a scenario not to contemplate.  For your patience, here’s a bonus.  Before the electoral map radically changed course last night, there had been a number of articles published on the Internet that showed what Trump had planned to do this morning if he had lost.  And since this was the plan, he obviously did not expect to win.  This link is an article about Trump supporters accusing Pennsylvania of rigging voting machines to turn Trump votes into Hillary votes.  I found another, not included here, in which his supporters claimed that Dem officials had camped out at polling stations giving cash to people in line to vote for Hillary.   These are the kinds of attacks he had planned for this morning if things didn’t go his way. 

Reports surface of voting machines 'flipping' ballots from Trump to Clinton -

Something else to contemplate.  I liked his victory speech last night.  Let’s hope for the country’s sake that he meant every word.  His history however is not a good indicator.