When Voting Doesn’t Work, Inequity Follows

As former president Barack Obama might have put it: Don’t boo. And definitely don’t riot. Vote.

But some votes count more than others. Some of these inequalities stem from the very structure of our 200-year-old electoral system, while others arise from more deliberate partisan meddling.

Those inequalities have widened in recent years, and in ways that systematically give White, rural and affluent voters a much bigger voice in the political system than non-White, urban and poor Americans. Here’s how:

The electoral college

The electoral college was created, in part, to bolster the political power of less populous and slaveholding states.

Electoral votes don’t scale evenly with population. States receive at least three electoral votes (one for each senator and representative), regardless of population. And the electoral votes of the most populous states are functionally capped by the number of U.S. House members which, with one brief and temporary exception, hasn’t changed since 1929.

As a result, voters in less populated states like Wyoming are overrepresented in the electoral college, relative to those in large states like California. On a per-capita level, “each individual Wyoming vote weighs 3.6 times more than an individual Californian’s vote,” as political scientist Katy Collin wrote in The Washington Post in 2016.

States with the fewest inhabitants also tend to be whiter than their more populous counterparts. As a result, no matter how you slice it, White voters have more power in presidential elections than non-White ones. One recent estimate found that “per voter, whites have 16 percent more power than blacks once the electoral college is taken into consideration, [and] 28 percent more power than Latinos.” Using a different calculation, researchers at the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that a Black vote has about 95 percent of the electoral potency as a White one.

As we’ve seen in two of the past five elections, these disparities can be large enough to hand the electoral victory to a candidate who received far fewer votes than his opponent. As a system designed to bolster the power of rural Whites at the expense of Black Americans, the electoral college continues to work exactly as designed.