What is the significance of one vote per state

In — 1. A recount produced the same result. Luthi was finally declared the winner when, in a drawing before the State Canvassing Board, a ping pong ball bearing his name was pulled from the cowboy hat of Democratic Governor Mike Sullivan. A subsequent recount showed Wick the winner at 4, to 4, The State Supreme Court however, ruled that one ballot counted for Wick was invalid due to an over-vote.

This left the race a tie. After hearing arguments from both sides, the State Legislature voted to seat Wick 46 to In — The Presidential election was decided by an extremely narrow margin. George W. Bush won the state of Florida by just votes, making him the next President of the United States. Close to 6 million voters went to the polls in Florida. Everyone, voter or not, should feel free to make constituent demands on how an elected official uses government power.

It allowed states to use that approach; it did not insist that they do so. The court did not finally rule out the second or third versions of the starting point for redistricting legislatures.

It said only that neither of those was required by the Constitution. It left for another day and a future case whether, if a state did use some version of voting population as the starting point for drawing equal new districts, that would violate one-person, one-vote theory.

At least Justice Clarence Thomas thought that a state could use a voter-based approach, and not violate the Constitution. But no other Justice joined in that view. Why would it be, then, that after the considerable labor of reviewing this fundamental test case on the theory of democratic representation, as a constitutional matter, the Justices would wind up making no firm declarations about what the Constitution required as electoral equality? Sometimes, that ultimate aim of judicial review gets frustrated, especially on a multi-member court, where majorities have to be put together, and maybe a definitive answer proves elusive and could not be achieved without fracturing the court.

In fact, some critics have complained that the Electoral College system encourages candidates to ignore voters in smaller states like Oklahoma and Mississippi , instead focusing on campaigning in big states like California and New York, which have lots of electoral votes.

But those states also have lots of voters — so a national popular vote system might also encourage candidates to pay more attention to places where many voters are concentrated. I compared the number of Electoral College votes each state has with various characteristics of the states — how many people live there, how many of its residents are eligible to vote and how many people actually cast ballots in My analysis finds that voters in small states have more Electoral College votes per capita than larger, more diverse states , using several different measures — and therefore more power to choose a president than they would have in a national popular election.

In , Republican Phil Bryant, who was then the governor of Mississippi, complained that states did not have equal power to pick the president. As it has been designed, as we look at the states where the more liberal voting populations may be in the cities, in New York and California and some of the other areas — all you have to do is win those particularly larger states and you can forget about flyover country. Even as far back as , Republican Sen.

But if there were a national popular vote instead of the Electoral College, similar criticisms could hold true: Candidates might still find it efficient, in terms of time and money, to focus their campaign efforts on places with larger populations. The idea that someone could lose the popular vote and still win the presidency has its own critics.

Today, the vote of a citizen in Wyoming is four times as powerful as the vote of a citizen in Michigan.

The vote of a citizen in Vermont is three times as powerful as a vote in Missouri. This denies Americans the fundamental value of a representative democracy — equal citizenship. States are assigned electoral votes based in part on their total populations.