Submitted by Taps Coogan on the 16th of September 2016 to The Sounding Line.

As our readers are surely aware, it’s election season in the US. Beyond the twists and turns of the political campaigns and endless election hyperbole and controversy lies the fundamental principal of democratic elections. Citizens of all backgrounds vote as equals to freely select their president and representatives in government. Underlying this is the essential idea that everybody gets one equal vote.

Yet in actuality everyone does not get an equal vote in US presidential elections.

This is not a reference to the issues surrounding voter identification, voter fraud, nor the scandals surrounding the presidential primaries this year. Quite simply, as a result of the Electoral College system used to determine the outcome of presidential elections, people have dramatically different voting power depending on which state they live in.

The outcome of US presidential elections are not determined based on which candidate receives the most votes from voters, but instead by which candidate receives the most votes from ‘Electors.’  As part of the Electoral College system, each state is designated a certain number of Electors based, very loosely, on the population of the state. The more people living in a state the more Electors the state gets. Exact rules vary from state to state, but in nearly all cases, all state Electors vote for the candidate that wins the most actual votes in their state. Only in Maine and Nebraska do Electors split their votes to be approximately in proportion to the outcome of the state vote. All other states are winner takes all.

Because the number of Electors is only based loosely on the population of each state, the number of people that each Elector represents can vary widely from state to state. As it turns out, voters in Wyoming have more Electors per capita than any other state (about 195,000 people per elector) making them the best represented voters in the country. At the other end of the spectrum, voters in Texas have the least Electors per capita (about 709,000 people per elector) or 27% of the per capita representation of Wyoming. The table below shows the voters per Elector for each state and the voting ‘power’ of a voter as compared to Wyoming, the state with the most powerful voters.

State	Electoral Votes (Electors)	Population	People per Elector	Percent of Wyoming’s Representation
Wyoming	3	584153	194718	100.00
Vermont	3	626011	208670	93.31
D.C.	3	672228	224076	86.90
Alaska	3	737732	245911	79.18
North Dakota	3	739482	246494	78.99
Rhode Island	4	1055173	263793	73.81
South Dakota	3	853175	284392	68.47
Delaware	3	935614	311871	62.44
New Hampshire	4	1326813	331703	58.70
Maine	4	1330089	332522	58.56
Montana	3	1023579	341193	57.07
Hawaii	4	1419561	354890	54.87
West Virginia	5	1850326	370065	52.62
Nebraska	5	1881503	376301	51.75
Idaho	4	1634464	408616	47.65
New Mexico	5	2085572	417114	46.68
Nevada	6	2839099	473183	41.15
Kansas	6	2904021	484004	40.23
Utah	6	2942902	490484	39.70
Mississippi	6	2984926	497488	39.14
Arkansas	6	2994079	499013	39.02
Connecticut	7	3596677	513811	37.90
Iowa	6	3107126	517854	37.60
South Carolina	9	4832482	536942	36.26
Alabama	9	4849377	538820	36.14
Minnesota	10	5457173	545717	35.68
Kentucky	8	4413457	551682	35.30
Oklahoma	7	3878051	554007	35.15
Oregon	7	3970239	567177	34.33
Wisconsin	10	5757564	575756	33.82
Louisiana	8	4649676	581210	33.50
Washington	12	7061530	588461	33.09
Colorado	9	5355856	595095	32.72
Tennessee	11	6549352	595396	32.70
Maryland	10	5976407	597641	32.58
Indiana	11	6596855	599714	32.47
Missouri	10	6063589	606359	32.11
Arizona	11	6731484	611953	31.82
Massachusetts	11	6745408	613219	31.75
Michigan	16	9909877	619367	31.44
Georgia	16	10097343	631084	30.85
New Jersey	14	8938175	638441	30.50
Pennsylvania	20	12787209	639360	30.46
Virginia	13	8326289	640484	30.40
Illinois	20	12880580	644029	30.23
Ohio	18	11594163	644120	30.23
North Carolina	15	9943964	662931	29.37
New York	29	19746227	680904	28.60
Florida	29	19893297	685976	28.39
California	55	38802500	705500	27.60
Texas	38	26956958	709394	27.45

Changing the ratio of Electors to voters between states means that a vote in a state like Wyoming and Vermont is more powerful in determining the outcome of elections than a vote in Texas or California.

Additionally, most states have winner take all policies for Electors. That means that whichever candidate receives the most votes gets all the Electors from that state even if the winning candidate only received only slightly more votes than the second place candidate. This practice may discourage voters in states where they are in the clear minority by making them believe that their vote won’t matter at all.

At its inception, Electors in the Electoral College system were expected to independently decide for whom to vote and were themselves appointed by rules that varied state to states. They could be elected or simply appointed. This was done in an attempt to limit the possibility for ‘tyranny of the majority.’ In practice however this system proved incompatible with national political parties and therefore all Electors are now appointed by elections held in each state based on ballots that do not contain the names of the Electors, only the candidates for president and vice president. Very rarely have Electors voted in contradiction to the outcome of state elections, so called ‘faithless electors,’ and never have they changed the outcome of an election (here). In many states Electors are required to vote according to the outcome of the state election (here).

Given all of this, there is little utility for the Electoral College in moderating the ‘tyranny of the majority’ in modern presidential elections. However, this is not to say that the Electoral College has no utility at all. The best argument in favor of the Electoral College is that it increases the voting power of rural states, thus preventing a ‘tyranny of the cities’ and the disfranchisement of the majority of the country in a purely geographic sense. Regardless of one’s feelings on the merits of the Electoral College, it is important to understand how it works and why it is there.