Ask any of my friends in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex how many Texans it takes to equal one District of Columbia resident and they won’t say two. But thanks to the baroque arithmetic of the electoral college, one vote from the District of Columbia is worth more than twice as much as a Texan’s vote.
Ask any of my Californian friends whether they think their vote should count as one-third of a Wyomingite’s and they will be equally indignant.
“One Person, One Vote” Is An Awesome Slogan
Don’t get me wrong: there are plenty of other problems with the way our electoral college works! (Winner-takes-all per state reduces the leverage of Hawaiian and Idahoan voters and increases Pennsylvanian and Floridian voters’ leverage. Sorry, Idaho! Sorry, Hawaii!)
But the most plain and simple problem is how far away from “one person, one vote” the arithmetic of the electoral college leads us.
Our History Has Its Flaws
OK, let’s not gloss over that it hasn’t always been “one person, one vote.” From 1789 through 1870 it was “one white man, one vote” and until 1920 it was “one man, one vote.” It’s only in the last century that it’s even nominally been “one person, one vote.” Of course there have been, and still are, wrinkles preventing full suffrage, but the historical trajectory has been a good trajectory.
Run The Numbers
Let’s run some numbers. It takes 270 electoral votes to elect a president. We can call that one electoral Presidential Unit (PU).
It takes a plurality of a state’s voters to win all of its electoral votes. (Shut up Maine and Nebraska, just let the rest of us work through this.) Let’s simplify and ignore third parties to get some solid numbers – specifically, 50% + 1 of a state’s voters, since that will definitively assign that state’s electoral votes.
Some quick math lets us figure out how much influence each voter in the “50% + 1” group has per electoral vote, which in turn lets us see how much each voter influences an electoral Presidential Unit. Just to make the numbers understandable, let’s use nano presidential units (nPU) and see how many nPU each voter contributes.
State: EV: 50% + 1: EV/voter: nPU:
------ --- -------- --------- ----
CA 55 7.12M 7.7*10^-6 28.6
TX 38 4.49M 8.4*10^-6 31.3
DC 3 0.16M 1.8*10^-5 69.4
WY 3 0.13M 2.3*10^-5 85.5
My vote mathematically counts for about 30 nanoPUs. Put another way, I am personally 1/33,000,000 responsible for picking a US president. A friend from a few states over, though, has a vote that counts for 85 nPUs, making them 1/12,000,000 responsible.
We Could Update The Slogan I Guess
“One person, one vote. A different person, three votes.”
That ain’t right.