Two Dakotas

Shortly following the 2016 election, Katy Collin noted in the Washington Post that because small states get more electoral votes per person than more populous states, the electoral college distorts the actual election results. Each state has the same number of votes in the electoral college as it has representatives in Congress. Since sparsely populated states have a minimum of two Senate seats and one House district, they have at least three votes. The most populated states have a ceiling, since the number of seats in the House of Representatives does not increase.

"That means that even the least populous state — Wyoming, with 586,107 residents — gets three electoral college votes. How disproportionate is that? Consider that California, the most populous state, has 39,144,818 residents and 55 electoral college votes. That means that in the electoral college, each individual Wyoming vote weighs 3.6 times more than an individual Californian’s vote. That’s the most extreme example, but if you average the 10 most populous states and compare the power of their residents’ votes to those of the 10 least populous states, you get a ratio of 1 to 2.5."

Since that time, California's population has gone up while Wyoming's has decreased.  According to the latest, July 2017 estimates, Texas, although not the most populous state, is the new loser with a whopping 744,858 people per electoral vote, while Wyoming has only 193,105 people per electoral vote.  That means that a Wyoming vote is now 3.85 times more powerful than a Texas vote. Want your vote to matter?  Move to Wyoming.

Those of us here in Georgia are 6th worst in the nation, with 684,462 people per electoral vote.

Meanwhile, what's going on in the Dakotas?  Combined, North and South Dakota have six electoral votes, but with only 1,625,059 people between the two states, that's 270,843 people per electoral vote. Why do we need two Dakotas anyway?  If the two states were combined into one, they would have 541,686 people per electoral vote, still low but more in line with Georgia and Texas.

If California were two states instead of one, they would have 693,625 people per electoral vote.

So here's a modest proposal: either abolish the electoral college so that we can move closer to a "one man, one vote" system, or barring that, for the purposes of the electoral college only, lump North and South Dakota together into one state and split California into two.