How much is a vote worth?

Three things that bend a vote’s weight

• The Senate’s two electors. Every state gets two electors for its senators, whatever its size, and DC gets three under the Twenty-third Amendment. Two extra electors mean a lot to a state with three and little to a state with fifty-four.
• Rounding House seats. House seats come in whole numbers, so districts can’t all be the same size. Today they range from 542,704 people in Montana, which has two seats, to 990,837 in Delaware, which has one. (Census Bureau)
• Turnout. Electors are fixed by population, but they’re decided by whoever votes. Where turnout is low, each voter carries more weight. Hawaii cast votes equal to 36% of its population in 2024, so each voter there counted 2.23 times the national average, against 1.69 times per resident. In Vermont, where votes equaled 57% of the population, high turnout cut each voter’s weight to 2.34 times, from 2.87 per resident.

Every state

Each state’s electors against what its share of the country would earn, measured two ways: by population, from the 2020 census, and by votes cast in 2024, both in millions. The first column gives each state and its electors (EC). “Extra” is the number of electors above (+) or below (−) that share. “Say” is how much one resident, or one voter, counts against the national average: 2.00× means twice the average. By population, a resident of Wyoming counts 3.20 times the average, and a resident of California 0.84 times. (Census Bureau, FEC)

The same comparison as a chart. Each row of gray blocks is a state’s electors, one block per elector; the line is its population share, the number of electors its population would earn. Blocks past the line are electors beyond the state’s share, colored by which way the state has leaned over the last five elections; a dashed outline past the blocks marks electors it’s missing. The numbers on the right count each state’s extra (+) or missing (−) electors, with a check for the rare near-exact fits. The scale is logarithmic, so the gap between the two shows the same ratio anywhere on the chart, and blocks get narrower as a row grows, since each extra elector is a smaller share of a bigger total. That makes small gaps in big states look small, which is why the counts matter: in absolute terms, the largest states lose the most.

Figure 15, step by step: Electors against population share, by state

The small-state advantage is often described as a boost for red states, but it runs both ways. By population, the 20 Republican-leaning states with extra weight carry about 22 extra electors, and the 13 Democratic-leaning ones about 19. The large states that come up short split nearly as evenly, so the net effect on either party is about 1 elector. (“Lean” is the same five-election score used to find each state’s match.)

The House size is a choice

Nothing in the Constitution sets the House at 435. Congress capped it there by law, most recently in 1929, and it hasn’t changed since. (House history) A larger House would give every state more electors and shrink the Senate’s share of each state’s total. One well-known benchmark is the cube root rule: national legislatures tend to have about as many members as the cube root of the population, which for the United States in 2020 would be 692 seats. Here’s what a few sizes would do, apportioned by the same method federal law uses today:

Two things stand out. First, the small-state advantage shrinks, but slowly: the Senate’s two electors never go away, so even a thousand-seat House leaves a Wyoming resident with about twice the average say. Second, rounding doesn’t steadily improve. Whole-number seats are lumpy, and the gap between the largest and smallest district can grow before it shrinks. A larger House also sharpens Fair Slate itself, since a state with more electors can match its vote in finer steps (more on that).

Compared with winner-take-all

None of this makes the imbalance less real. It’s an unfortunate feature of the Electoral College, and its critics are right to point it out. But it isn’t unique to the Electoral College. The Senate gives every state two seats whatever its size, House districts vary because seats come in whole numbers, and every legislature elected by region carries some of the same imbalance, at least from rounding. Many go further and give smaller regions extra weight on purpose: every Australian state elects 12 senators, and Germany’s states each get between 3 and 6 votes in its upper house however large they are. It’s what happens whenever an election system is built from regional blocs instead of one national pool.

Add up every state that gets more than its share, and the extra comes to about 41 electors, almost exactly the same whether measured by population or by votes cast. Winner-take-all, by contrast, sent 225 electors to a different candidate in 2024 than a proportional split would have. (How the split is calculated)

The two problems also differ in kind. Uneven weight makes some votes count a little more or less than others. Winner-take-all makes the losing side’s votes in each state count for nothing. Both are worth fixing, but not to the same degree.

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