Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in Keep It Rural, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Like what you see? Join the mailing list for more rural news, thoughts, and analysis in your inbox each week.
In late 2023, I wrote a Keep It Rural on the conundrum of how to vote with two disappointing presidential options. I wrote about what another Trump presidency could look like, the growing movement to abstain from voting, and (what I see) as a failed electoral system.
This week, I want to hone in on this last point about the unfortunate reality that your vote matters more or less depending on where you live.
First, a refresher: the Electoral College is a format for voting where states are given a certain number of electoral votes based on how many house representatives they have, plus two votes for their two senators. The number of house representatives a state has is based on its population size. In (almost) every state, the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote in that state receives every single electoral vote.
But the total number of house representatives and senators is not exactly proportionate to the population of each state. For example, California – the most populous state – has 54 electoral votes to represent 39.24 million people.
In Wyoming – the least populous state – about 578,000 people are represented by three electoral votes. Even though California has roughly 68 times as many people as Wyoming, an individual’s vote counts 3.6 times as much in Wyoming as it does in California.
And because most states except Maine and Nebraska operate by a “winner-takes-all” model – whoever wins the most votes in California gets all 54 electoral votes – the votes of people who lost to the majority in their state are not taken into consideration at the federal level.
Approximately 11 million Californians voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, and six million voted for Donald Trump. Because of the way the Electoral College operates, those six million votes were a wash; they did nothing to help Trump win. In a direct popular vote where every single vote cast is counted toward each candidate, those six million votes would have been counted the same as any other.
This math tracks across party lines. In Missouri where Trump won the majority vote in 2020, the 1.2 million votes that went to Biden versus the 1.7 million that went to Trump was another total wash. Under a different model, those 1.2 million Biden votes could have counted toward his total.
Assigning all of the electoral votes in a state to one candidate pigeon holes that place as “red” or “blue,” instead of a place where both progressive and conservative values exist. This means rural America is typified as a swath of Republicans, even though many liberals also live in rural areas. The same goes for cities which are typified as Democratic havens, even though there are plenty of conservative values that drive urban politics.
Misconstruing places for political ideologies drives a wedge further between rural and urban America.
Many people believe the Electoral College unfairly benefits rural America. There is some truth in this: states with fewer people tend to have disproportionate electoral votes, as the Wyoming example shows. But this argument forgets that rural America is not just less-populated states.
More than three million people live in rural Pennsylvania, for example, where the total population is roughly 13 million – the fifth-largest state in the country. But it only gets 19 electoral votes, which means urban and rural Pennsylvania voters are underrepresented.
If individual votes were given the same weight across state lines, it wouldn’t matter if you lived in a more Republican or more Democratic state – your vote would count just the same.
So, what’s the alternative? Many people believe getting rid of the Electoral College is a fraught effort, especially considering that we’ve entered a presidential election year that will operate using the Electoral College. “Focus on what’s realistic,” they argue. I agree with this, and also recognize that fighting for our future near, and far away, matters too.
There are two states doing it differently, and perhaps more realistically for what’s possible right now: Maine and Nebraska. These states use a split vote method for counting votes, which means that whichever candidate wins the popular vote in each congressional district is assigned an elector. The two electoral votes each state is automatically given (the senators) go to whoever won Maine and Nebraska’s overall popular vote.
Most of the time all the electoral votes in these states still go to one candidate, but this appears to be changing. In the 2020 election, Maine had a split vote with three electoral votes for Biden, and one for Trump. In Nebraska, Trump won four electoral votes and Biden won one. The variation of political ideology in these largely rural states was represented better than in any other state.
While a split vote method might not perfectly value each individual’s vote, it’s a step in that direction. Would it really kill us to try something new?
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