Many people want to abolish the electoral college, such as can be seen in link #63632
. The argument given is that the electoral college gives too much voting power to the smaller (population-wise) states because there are fewer people per electoral vote.
The author of this page
argues that it's actually the other way around - people in the larger states have significantly more voting power than those in smaller states. The author has a rather lengthy setup, but the main results are here
The method he uses is the Banzhaf Power Index. The main idea is that a voter's power index is the probability that his/her vote can affect the outcome of the election (an underlying assumption is that there are two candidates). The way that Banzhaf and others calculate this probability for a voter of a certain state, like California, is:
1. Look at all of the possible ways the other 49 states could go (2^49 ways).
2. Look at the probability of a person casting the deciding vote in California.
3. Combine these to find the probability of a person casting the deciding vote in California that bumps his/her candidate up from below 270 electoral votes to at least 270 electoral votes (ie, the probability that his/her vote wins the election for his/her candidate).
Now, modern computers aren't capable of checking every case. Instead, the author runs a Monte Carlo simulation
, which is akin to taking a large sample. Since they're choosing their sample randomly, it seems reasonable that the results from their sample should hold if they were to do all of the calculations exhaustively. (Also, it should be mentioned that the data used for the simulations are not taking proportional EC voting into account for states like Maine and Nebraska.)
The result is that a Californian has more than 3 times the chance of affecting the election than a voter from Montana. Even compared to a voter from Wyoming, a Californian has 2.5 times the voting power.
Here's a small example to illustrate what is going on here. Say there are four states: A, B, C, and D. Suppose A, B, and C each have 4 electoral votes, and D has 3 (all in winner-take-all schemes). So there are 15 total electoral votes. To be elected president, you need a majority, so you need 8 votes. This sucks for state D, because there is no case in which they'd be the swing vote. To win an election, you have to carry two of A,B,C. End of story. Winning D won't change a thing, so voters from D effectively have no voting power. A presidential candidate would just be wasting money by campaigning in D.
Note: There have been real-world situations like this small example where a country had no voting power.