by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-09 19:34:20+00:00
> There's a bit more to it than the +2 electoral votes from the senate, because even within the House the representations are skewed due to the strange decision to cap the size of the House at 435 seats while guaranteeing each state at least one seat.

Capping the number of seats is dumb but the way they're apportioned doesn't give any major advantage to small states because the size of the average district and the size of the smallest state aren't very far apart, to the point that some of the districts in states with more than one district have lower populations than some of the states with a single district. Out of the 50 smallest districts, two are state-wide districts; out of the 50 largest districts, two are state-wide districts. The largest district is less than twice the size of the smallest district.

And there is no partisan divide in which states are over or under-represented because of this. Some of the most over-represented districts are currently in Rhode Island and Vermont. Some of the most under-represented districts are currently in Idaho, West Virginia, Utah and Texas. It's basically random because it depends on how evenly the state's population divides the national population, so the only consistent thing is that districts in the biggest states will tend to be of average size and districts in smaller states will tend to be either over-represented or under-represented.

Or to put it another way, California has 52 reps but its population is 71 times the population of the average district in Rhode Island. Except that these are both blue states.

> But most states will not do this because usually the party that wins all the EVs is also the party that controls the state government, and they don't want to give away half their EVs to the other party.

In some sense this is strong evidence that the government is bad at representing the constituents, i.e. the principal-agent problem is real. Constituents in safe states like California would be better off if candidates actually had to care about their votes. Even if you're in the state's majority, it's better for you that candidates from both parties have to address your issues rather than taking you for granted. It might even cause a shift in national priorities towards those of the state because both parties would have to do more to appease them. But then the state's representatives have more loyalty to the national party than their local constituents.

If states like California wanted to be clever they would allocate their electoral college votes something like "if a candidate gets more than 50% of the state's popular vote, they get 50% of its electoral votes plus 5% for each 1% over 50%, with the remainder going to the second place candidate". Which means that in the typical case where the Democrats get >=60% of the state's popular vote, they still get all of the electoral college votes -- 50% + 5x10%. But then that 10% difference between 50% and 60% becomes important to both parties, because each vote in that range is worth five times its weight in electoral votes.

And meanwhile if the Democratic candidate was going to get less than 60% of the vote in California they were very likely to lose the electoral college regardless.