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I was gonna say, the US president is decided by electoral college votes. The citizens votes only count in a tie, right?
Think of the Electoral College as simply a weighted sum of each state's Presidential Election. All the votes count the same, but only at the State level. Once a state goes for one candidate or the other, the popular vote is "converted" into EC votes.
The EC weighting is based on the state's total representation in Congress, and while the House is allocated (roughly) by population, each State gets two Senators. So, even the smallest states are guaranteed 3 EC votes.
Which, in and of itself, is bullshit since The House gives people in Wyoming something like 6x the voting power of people in California.
"roughly" doing some heavy lifting in that sentence despite the parentheses
A Wyomian has 80 times a Californians say in the presidential election.
I was going to insult Wyomians here but none of them would even read it.
I thought it was something like 6x? Still ridiculous.
House Seats are reallocated based on population after each census. There's even an algorithm for it.
The real problem is that the size of the House has been fixed. It didn't use to be this way. They used to add seats after each census, but about 100 years ago they couldn't agree on how to add them, so they stopped, and the size of the House has been fixed since then.
So while the average district size is now around 750k, the smallest districts are in states like Rhode Island, where the population is in the 500k range, and they still get one House member. (But not all small states benefit: the largest district is Delaware's lone district, which has over 900k people in it but is not large enough to split in two yet.)
I bet if they had kept adding, there might be 575 or so members , with an average district size below 600k.
That is not true, the winner (in many if not most, certainly the red states) states give all of the EC votes to the winner that won by 1 vote. Completely throwing off any claim of any representation in those states. People's votes literally don't count there
Well no, you miss my point. You need to look at the election just like any other State election. Harris won the election to be President in California, for instance, and Trump won the election to be President in Wyoming, by the normal rules every other election uses.
Its in the combination where people get shafted. Californians cast more than 15 million votes to determine 54 EC votes, or something like 278k votes per EC vote. But Wyoming only cast 262k votes total. Divided by their 3 EC votes it only took 88k votes to "count" for one EC vote.
So the votes count equally in each state, but when they are combined in the EC a Wyoming vote has over 3x more "power" than a California vote.
If no candidate gets a majority of electoral votes, congress decides. And it's not even each member gets a vote. Each state gets one vote with the house picking the president and the senate picking the vice president.