Each Electoral College elector represents just over 620,000 Americans on average. But there are significant regional imbalances. In Wyoming, they represent just under 195,000 citizens each; in Texas, it’s more than 760,000, almost four times as many!
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It is the 538 electors of the electoral college who elect the President of the United States. Each state is represented there according to its population.
California, the most populous with its nearly 39 million inhabitants, has 54 electors. At the other end, Wyoming, with only 600,000 residents, has only three.
Large states underrepresented
But there you go. California has only 10% of the electors even though it contains almost 12% of the total population of the United States. The same goes for Texas which includes 9% of the population, but only 7% of the electoral college.
These large states are underrepresented. If the college really reflected the weight of these two states in the total population of the country, California would have 63 electors, Texas 49. Each would have nine more.
Small states overrepresented
It is the opposite for smaller states. There are seven who send three electors each to the electoral college. If this number was representative of their population, they would only delegate one or two each.
There are only nine states that are adequately represented in the Electoral College, including Wisconsin, where Democrats and Republicans both hope to bag the 10 electoral votes. This means that there is an imbalance in 42 states (including the District of Columbia).
What effect on the results?
Would an electoral college more representative of the population change the outcome of the November 5 vote? The question arises, since most pivotal states are under-represented. Together, they have 93 electoral votes. Depending on their population, they should have more like 99.
We looked at what would happen in the eight scenarios outlined by Nicolas Bérubé in The Press last Saturday. If there are some changes in the number of electoral votes each wins, the person elected remains the same in all cases.
In scenario 1 (Harris wins the Rust Belt), the Democratic candidate still wins with 270 electoral votes against 268 for Trump.
In the second, Donald Trump won a narrower victory with 272 voters rather than 270.
A repeat of Joe Biden’s victory would be even clearer for Mme Harris since she would win with 305 electors rather than the 303 that the Democrats won in 2020.
Same thing if the Republican candidate repeated his 2016 victory. It would be clearer with 309 electoral votes, three more than the 306 he obtained eight years ago.
