How Many Electoral Votes Have You Earned Travelling?
by tdaxp ~ July 23rd, 2006
While I was in Fort Wayne, my friend Biz suggested that I calculate the states I had visited. He says that a state only counts as visited if one had mingled among the local people by buying some thing, and that airports did not count. I thus looked online for a clickable states visited map, and I was unimpressed with what was available. So I used a clickable electoral college map similar to the one I used for my analysis of the West Wing election
tdaxp has been in 279 electoral votes worth of states (plus one district!)
While I have an absolute electoral votes without them, I have included Mississippi, Tennessee, and Georgia as “undecided.” Like every other American I have spent time in Atlanta’s airport, I drove through Tennessee on my recent interesting adventure, and was previously in a bus in Mississippi.
July 26th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Dan,
Thanks to a grandfather with a travel trailer and 5 weeks of vacation annuallly, by Dave’s rules I got most of the lower 48 states and all Canadian provinces west of Montreal by the time I was 16. I’m now missing only Vermont, Alaska, and Hawaii. If you go to Seattle, leave time for visiting Vancouver and Olympic National Park. And if you ever wander out to the Valley of the Sun, let me know!
Mike
July 24th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Dan,
I think rolling through the state on a bus should count as “being there”. You’ve gotten to see what really goes on there, even if you didn’t get to interact. You DID get to observe and orient around the local culture.
You really do need to get out to the western states. There’s so much you can’t see east of the Rockies!
Happy Trails,
Mike
July 25th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Mike,
Thanks for the kind words! I’m afraid I got to observe a little too much of the culture of Greyhound lines, but… already possessing 279 electoral votes worth of states visited… I’m not too worried.
(If I had to choose, I would give myself Tennessee but relinquish Mississippi and Georgia. But my friend Dave gave me the rules he keeps scores with, so I’ll keep the current system to keep things equal to him…)
I definitely want to see things farther west. Seattle has long been on the list of things I must see, and after I discovered my farmer grandfather once spent a summer in Los Angeles, I’ve been anxious to see that, too.
June 17th, 2008 at 5:03 am
[...] reason for the trip was not just to avoid living in the airport, but to add another state to my Electoral Vote total. Now that I’ve been in non-airport California, I get to add the Bear Flag Republic to my [...]