Wrapping Up Summer 2022 IMD High School Research

As the summer comes to a close, high schoolers Emily Pallan and Raj Savla have finished their research project with IMD. They investigated how different sizes of the House of Representatives and different apportionment methods would have affected the outcome of recent American presidential elections. They experimented with House sizes from 435 up to 700, then calculated the apportionment of these seats using the Hamilton, Jefferson, Adams, Webster, Dean, and Huntington-Hill methods. Then, using the state and district results of the 2012, 2016, and 2020 elections, they analyzed how the winner may have changed under the various House sizes if the elections were conducted using the usual statewide winner-take-all electoral system but also in the hypothetical case where the electors are allocated district-wide. They found that some outcomes would have flipped while others would have been unmodified. For example, Biden likely would have won 2020 no matter what House size or apportionment method was used, while Clinton would have won in 2016 with a bigger House. Their results also include insights into the margin of electoral votes for the winning candidate and how many votes were needed to flip each election.