United States Elections

…Are coming up soon, so here’s a bit of math:

The US House of Representatives is analogous to our own House of Commons. The number of representatives from each state is proportional to that state’s population as a fraction of the total in the country. There are 435 total seats.

The Senate, on the other hand, has two representatives from each state, regardless of population.

This brings us to the presidential election. In the United States, each state is allocated a number of Electoral College electors equal to the number of its Senators and Representatives. This means that for small states, the amount of representation can be significantly skewed by the fact that the state has two senators regardless of its population.

For example, California, the most populous state, has 53 seats, while Utah has only 3 seats. Each state has 2 senators. California has a population of 36,553,215 as of the last census. Utah has a population of 2,645,330. This means that the ratio of Californian electoral college votes to those from Utah is 55:5 = 11. The ratio of the states’ populations is 36,553,215:2,645,330 = 13.82. Thus, each vote in California is worth 11/13.82 = 0.796 votes from Utah. In other words, the numbers are skewed in favor of the voters in certain states, in this case Utah.

To make matters worse, the Electoral College works on a winner-takes-all basis, where each state essentially supports a particular presidential candidate with all of its electors. This means that regardless of how individual Californians vote, one particular person will have the support of all 55 electors.

The strange result is that candidates can fail to get the most votes in a nationwide poplar vote in a presidential election and still win the election. This has happened three times.