On this version, The EVs are calculated automatically, so just put any positive number (I'd put a '1', but put whatever you want since it has no effect on anything) in the appropriate 'tally' field and the EVs are calculated automatically. The only exceptions are NE & ME which allocate their EVs by congressional district, so you'll need to manually enter the appropriate values.
Some caveats: 1) There is no error checking, so if you give a state to both candidates, it will not complain. 2) I can't seem to figure out how to lock the cell functions, so watch for stray key presses. The purple cells are auto-calculated, so just avoid them.
What do you think?
[Excel File]
9 comments:
Looks great. You should fix the subtotal of the EVs for the 7pm closers though. Looks like you included more cells in your sum than you intended.
H61 and H61 are wrong
I'll look at it again tomorrow when I'm sober, but I don't see any problems... There are no subtotals, just running totals. There were subtotals until I realized that they served no real purpose. Running totals serve almost no purpose but were convenient. As far as H61 and H61, well... They're the same thing. But in spite of that, I don't see any problems. If I'm missing something, some additional info would be helpful.
Running totals are much more in line with the way a human being (who might not bring a laptop to the election-watching party) would use this kind of sheet by hand. That's the "almost no purpose." It means that when I get a new piece of information, I only have to add two numbers -- my previous highest total and the new addition.
It doesn't even preclude the possibility that states would be called in the "wrong" order and that my hand-written total might not increase neatly down the column. That also preserves a sense of "how things evolved over the course of the night, which is kinda nice."
I suspect you could create the running-total column to do that same behavior (look at the highest number in the column and then add the new number), although you'd have to be careful of circular references.
I'm not sure if states are legally allowed to be called while polls are open in any part of them, by the way -- you might want to check on that.
Hi,
I'm the anonymous who posted the original comment about the subtotals. Not the same as the other guy so I don't know what he meant about H61.
My comment referred specifically to spreadsheet cell B11. Judging from the rest of the blue shaded cells in row B I figured this was intended to be the total EVs available from the states closing at 7pm EST. If you add them by hand you get 70, but the spreadsheet has 108. This is because the definition of this cell is =SUM(B2:B10) instead of =SUM(B5:B10), so the subtotal contains not only the states that close at 7 but also the states that close a 6 twice.
Here is another scorecard. I won't have a PC at our county election night party so I'll be using the old sticky thing, eh, pencil.
The spreadsheet really was a good idea. I especially like the pie and wanna get Gramma to bake one with blueberries.
The ABSolute margin was a needed tweak. If I were using this with a pencil I'd probably keep a running total as each state was called by looking at the EVs on the left and writing the new sum in the EV count column on that line. When a new state was called, I'd circle the old total and draw an arrow to the newest state to be called where the new running total would reside. The way you have ordered it maximizes the likelihood that I will be able to go down the page with minimal jumps up and down the list, like a flowchart. There's plenty of space to mess around with.
I don't think you really need to keep the time column, listing "8:00" 19 times for example. And someone might want to log the actual time the state as "called" in that 8:__ space, so it has a possible alternate use.
The scorecard Diogenes points to has a mini-map of current poll results. If you are still refining a v3.0 or non-beta version, it could be useful to include mini-maps such as the current state polls, poll closing times map and the voting method map, so that as results come in users could look at these for easy reference. Although it may be redundant information, it's easier to uptake as a map sometimes.
-fwiw-
Anon #1: Sorry, I misunderstood which field you were talking about. I was looking at the EVs won fields. I have corrected the bug that you noticed.
Aimee: Thanks for the feedback. That was my thinking about the running totals when I put them in, but in retrospect I'm not sure that they have any real value. I doubt that after the fact, anyone would ever want to look back and say "Hmm, I wonder how many EVs Obama won in states whose polls close at 9PM EST?", and since the states won't really be called in the order that they are sorted, it's true informational value is slim. I think my next version will due away with the lines between the timezones completely. That will make the whole thing sortable by whatever field the end user wants, rather than just the poll closing time. You'll still have the cumulative total at the bottom that will be automatically calculated.
As for the legality of states being called before all the polls are closed, I can't confirm it, but I got my data from The Green Papers who have this note: "Note that the media has historically called states when MOST rather than ALL of the polls have closed" and they have detailed, state-by-state predictions of when they expect the media to begin calling a state. Of course, having been burned in the past, they could be more conservative this year.
Blues: A map would be handy, but if you're doing it on the computer, you'll probably be able to find better info on the web than I can link to, and if you're printing out the spreadsheet to use manually, you might not want to waste the space. I like the idea, but I think it's simpler to just leave the map up to the end user.
What would be very cool, but way beyond my ability would be a dynamically updated map. Oh, well... Maybe for 2012.
Updated version available.
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