Larry Lessig in this post (and the accompanying chart) is trying to show the way that the Electoral College system creates disproportionality in voting power. Essentially, his point is this.
But the problem with theoretically reapportioning the Electoral College vote by state population, although it makes a gigantic difference in the number of electors per state (California would have 200 (rather than 55) to Wyoming’s 3), is that it does not fully address the problem of disproportionality, the goal of which should be “one person, one vote,” and all votes counted equally. Here is a comment I left on Lessig’s post above — I am reposting it here because I can’t find a way to link just to the comment:
“This does not account for the dilutive effect of winner-take-all states and the further dilutive effect of a federal system (that is, the simple fact that there are fifty states). Trying to divide the population up by 50 (or 51), using geography, will always result in an “apportionment paradox,” no matter how fairly we try to apportion the number of electors by actual state population. That’s why, as Arnie Berman points out in another comment to this post, reapportioning the electoral votes by population would not have changed the outcome of this election — just truing up the Electoral College by population does not fully address the problem of unequal voting power. Essentially, the math problem is that you cannot have “fractions of states” or “fractions of electors” (eww), so you end up with massive numbers of people lost to rounding — the rounding of winner-take-all electoral states, and the rounding of millions of Americans into 50/51 geographic buckets. What Lessig’s chart actually shows is not the “unequal voting power of US citizens in presidential elections,” but the unequal voting power of US states in presidential elections. The unequal voting power of individual citizens is actually far more extreme. And that’s before you apply the “taxation-without-representation” filter — that is, overlaying the federal taxes paid (or, at the other extreme, tax revenues received) of citizens in each of the 50 states.”
There are solutions, of course. The most likely to actually happen, it seems to me, is for a few more states to adopt the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, whereby the adopting states agree to pledge all of their electors in future presidential elections to the winner of the national popular vote, effective upon the Compact’s adoption by states that control 270 or more electoral votes (the number needed to elect a president). States are constitutionally permitted to adopt any method they want for appointing electors, so presumably an interstate compact that tracks the national vote would be enforceable. We could also just abolish the Electoral College and adopt a direct popular vote for president, without aggregating by state, but good luck with that. Or we could, as more than a few clever law students have argued, give the electors fractional votes that correspond exactly to the number of voters they represent. Like a condominium! As a real estate lawyer, I really like that one, and think it should also be considered as a way to make the votes of the House of Representatives more democratic.