Welcome to Florida, where votes matter less

More voters cast their ballots for Beau Simon than the U.S. senator known lately as “the most powerful man in Washington.”

Last time Sen. Joe Manchin was on the ballot, 290,510 votes were plenty enough to return him to Congress, where he now has a virtual veto over Joe Biden’s legislative ambitions. “Biden may live in the White House, but the conservative Democratic Senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia is effectively president,” lamented Guardian columnist David Sirota.

Beau Simon was nobody’s idea of a powerbroker, but as an 18-year-old candidate running for a seat on the board of the Broward County Soil and Water Conservation District in 2020, he received 1,448 more votes in his election than the formidable senator managed in his two years before.

But 73-year-old Manchin ran in West Virginia, where an undemocratic American democracy invests the electorate of one of the poorest, least-educated states in the nation (and my home state) with considerably more clout than no-account residents of Florida.

Beau Simon lost to Fred Segal, who received 493,619 votes in Broward, 203,109 more than the statewide total for the West Virginian described by the Washington Post as “a red-state Democrat in a 50-50 Senate who has emerged as the ultimate swing vote of the Biden era.”

Segal took his heftier mandate to the soil and water conservation district. Manchin, meanwhile, will decide whether Congress will add dental, visual and hearing coverage to Medicare or finance free tuition at community colleges or encourage alternatives to fossil fuel or fund government-backed child care.

Manchin represents a rural constituency who simply matter more than us citified voters. That’s glaringly obvious in presidential elections. Donald Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016 by 2.9 million votes, but carried states like Wyoming, which is assigned one electoral college vote per 195,369 voters; compare that to Florida, where we get one for every 648,321 residents. A Wyoming voter is 3.5 times more valuable in a presidential election than some random Floridian.

Florida’s power deficit becomes even greater if the electoral college votes are juxtaposed against the actual election turnout. Writing in The Conversation, a nonprofit website that publishes work by academic experts, University of Washington mathematics professor Dale Durran measured the relative impact of an average vote cast in the

2016 presidential election. Durran found that a single vote in Wyoming was 2.97 times more valuable than the national average, while a vote in Florida, a big state with a big turnout, was worth just .78 of the national average. We matter less.

Same with the U.S. Senate, which allots a state like West Virginia, with fewer residents than Broward County, two senators, same as Florida but not the same, not really, given that one of those West Virginian senators, despite receiving 4,544,681 fewer votes than Sen. Marco Rubio racked up in the 2016 election, has become the nation’s decider. Never mind that the decider was reelected with less votes than the loser in last year’s Broward sheriff election. Or that Broward’s at-large school board candidate, Debra Hixon, won her seat with nearly twice as many votes as Manchin.

Now another kind of electoral disparity looms over Florida, as the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature oversees the redrawing of congressional and state legislative districts. There’s already suspicion that the mapmakers are employing software contrived to preserve gerrymandered districts that — in a state with more registered Democrats than Republicans — allows the GOP a two-to-one advantage in Florida’s congressional delegation and hefty majorities in both chambers of the state legislature.

The 2010 Fair Districts constitutional amendments, approved by 63% of the state’s voters, require district boundaries to be drawn without partisan bias. But Fair Districts seems to be regarded in Tallahassee as more an inconvenience than a legal obligation.

We’ve good reason to be distrustful. In

2015, the Florida Supreme Court found the Legislature’s last redistricting effort, based on the 2010 census, was “tainted with improper political intent.”

University of Florida political science professors Michael McDonald and Daniel Smith warned in a column published in the Tampa Bay Times last week that another “dark cloud” hangs over the latest redistricting operation. The professors cited “clear evidence the Legislature is shielding data from the public’s eyes — information that would help the Legislature violate their constitutional obligations under Fair Districts.”

That’s hardly shocking news. In the national and congressional and state legislative elections of America’s undemocratic democracy, voting majorities too often matter less than the geographic whereabouts of the voters. Which helps explain how an unremarkable senator from Fairmont, West Virginia, whose vote totals couldn’t get him elected to the Broward school board, got to be king.