Decoding the Electoral College
For the second lesson in our series we focused on understanding the electoral college in preparation for the upcoming election. We began the lesson by defining the term "electoral college", and learning about the "winner-take-all" system of voting. We then determined how many electoral votes a president must have in order to win an election (270), and about the problem that arose in the election of 1800 when two candidates received the same number of electoral votes. We continued our lesson by studying a simulation of past elections (link below) to study swing vs. safe states. Then the question of "how is the number of electoral votes for each state determined?", so we used a simple formula to predict (and check against past election years!) the electoral votes of various states. Finally, to end our lesson we learned about gerrymandering: what it means, its humorous origin, and we even practiced creating our own districts to see how gerrymandering can impact an election.