DALLAS TWP. — Dallas Middle School held a mock election for president Monday, but with a twist. Homerooms were given electoral votes based on the number of students.
“We wanted it to be more like the real election,” teacher Harry Haas said of the added layer to the exercise.
During the morning school TV broadcast, Haas took to the little stage in a studio that blends old cathode ray tube televisions and new laptops to explain how the election would work. With district students attending in-person classes in a hybrid mode — one group in class while the other learns live online — about half the students voted in their homeroom period at the start of the day while the other half voted from home.
“Which is good, this year,” Haas said, ‘it’s like mail-in ballots.”
During his school TV presentation Haas ran a short video explaining that the United States is not a democracy in the truest sense of direct election, but a constitutional republic and a representative democracy. Haas then put a spreadsheet on the screen showing how homerooms had been assigned “electoral votes.” The more students in the room, the more electoral votes. Staff collectively also got electoral votes, an impressive 26 votes for 67 people.
“You can see how that would be a pretty big one to win,” he told the students.
The school even devised a version of the familiar “red-state, blue-state” map so ubiquitously used in election coverage to give a visual snapshot of which party is winning more states. Once the votes were tallied, a floor plan of the school was overlaid with blue or red in each homeroom to show who won.
Haas also tried to give a taste of the live updates TV news gives as results come in, promising updates on the vote count about every two school periods.
And who did win? While not decisively Republican, Dallas sits in a redder section of Luzerne County than some other spots such as densely populated Wilkes-Barre, so school mock elections have often, though not always, favored a Republican candidate.
Monday was no exception. Trump won both the popular vote, 272 to 202, and the school’s Electoral College, 110 to 60.