I love maps.  They’re like place porn.  I even like interactive maps, even though so many things “interactive” are really just gimmicky and the interactivity offers nothing new or insightful.  In this three-part series, I want to share three of my favorite online map toys.

There are a number of interactive maps that allow you play around with different electoral college scenarios.  The best of them, I think, is the “Pick Your President” map at the Washington Post.  It’s easiest to start with the 2004 election results by using the dropdown under Starting Picks (on the left side) and selecting “2004 Results.”  Then you can click on each state to toggle between red and blue, and the site will automatically update the resulting electoral vote totals.

This is my fairly optimistic prediction for this year’s presidential election:

That’s pretty much a best-case scenario.  There are a few states Bam could win (Nevada, North Carolina, Indiana, Missouri) that I didn’t give him, and a few he might not (Ohio, Florida) but I’m betting in this solid 333-205 victory.

Experimenting with different scenarios, you’ll see that that there are several terrifying but realistic possibilities that would result in a 269-269 ties (please, no!).  Nate Silver explores this horrific possibility in this series.

What would happen?  In the event of a tie in the electoral college, the 12th Amendment calls for the election to be resolved by a vote in the House of Representatives.  Yay!  Obama wins!  No, not so fast.  Each state’s delegation votes.  The winner gets that state’s single “vote.”  So Alaska’s vote counts just as much as California’s.  To make matters more difficult to predict, it would be the incoming 2009 House that would vote (i.e.  this thing would not be resolved until January).  It’s likely that Obama would still win, though that’s far from certain.  We just don’t want to have to go through this.

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