Social Sciences and History / Unit 16 SSH 1505 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Sample Question Five: Missouri's Eleven Electoral Votes
The idea
The stem gives Missouri eleven electoral votes, a Democratic candidate at fifty point zero one percent of the popular vote and a Republican at forty-nine point nine nine, and asks how the state's electoral vote would be apportioned. The options: six and five; five and a half each; all eleven to the Democratic candidate; two at-large to the Democrat and nine by popular vote; the Missouri House decides. The key is C. Entry 0812 carries the anchor's key term: under the winner-take-all system all a state's electoral votes go to the candidate who wins the most votes there, a plurality. The distractors: A and B are proportional splits no state uses, and B is arithmetically impossible; D describes a district system, and Missouri is not one of the two states, Nebraska and Maine, that use it; E confuses the state with the House of Representatives' contingent role when no candidate wins a majority of electors.
In practice
A margin of two hundredths of a percent changes nothing: the most votes takes all eleven.
Where people slip
The trap is D, which describes a real system in the wrong state. The second trap is E, which describes the federal House's tiebreak, not a state legislature's.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Builds on
Unlocks
- Nothing yet depends on this.
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