The last article got me thinking about the US electoral college and so I decided to describe the relative power of its citizens using a ratio. Here’s the chart, and it’s coloured in so you can get an idea of who it benefits, if anyone. I was surprised that Texas is the most disenfranchised …
The EC votes are equal to the number of Congress representatives + two to represent the Senators. Each state must have one Congress representative. The apportionment of the Congress representatives was done nearly 10 years ago and things have changed. Wikipedia has a page on this and I used their table to build my chart, although if I had looked harder, they have one similar.
There are three causes of this inequality
- Each state gets a vote for each Senator irrespective of the number of voters in the state
- There is a floor of three votes/state which explains the difference in influence between the states with three EC votes
- Some states have grown in population, and others shrunk; the allocations are 10 years old.
Citizen voting power in the US