‘One person, one vote’ is a lie in the U.S.

Why does the vote of a Wyoming resident count three times as much as the vote of a Connecticut resident?

When we elect a president, why does the vote of a Wyoming resident count three times as much as the vote of a Connecticut resident? Anyway, do you think it really matters whether you vote for president in a general election in Connecticut, or do you already know which way our state’s electoral votes are going? And why, when Hillary Clinton won 3,000,000 more votes than Donald Trump, did Donald Trump become president? The Electoral College, which apportions votes for our highest office to the states based on their number of representatives and senators in Congress, was created because the Founding Fathers did not trust ordinary, ill-informed citizens to make a wise decision about who should be president. As Hamilton wrote in Federalist 68, “election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station … A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.”

But by the early 19th century, state legislatures, jockeying for influence, had already begun to apportion their electors as “blocs.” Only Maine and Nebraska still allow electors to vote separately, and all electors are bound by an accumulation of law and tradition to vote for their state’s chosen candidate. (“Faithless” electors are extremely rare.) So the Electoral College isn’t doing what it was intended to do: the President isn’t being chosen by “smarter” or “better informed” elites. But it’s also not doing what most of us want it to do: it’s not representing the will of the American people.

Democracy requires “symmetry”— the basic principle of “one person, one vote.” The less symmetry there is, the closer we get to oligarchy, or rule by the few.

I think that many Americans sense that not everyone’s vote counts equally, and that (in all but the 12 or so “battleground states”) the outcome of the presidential election is basically already determined by the state’s partisan leanings. When you combine the unequal apportionment of electoral votes with the power of money in politics, then add the determined work of various legislators to disenfranchise poor urban residents (e.g., by requiring a driver’s license to vote) in the name of a bogeyman called “voter fraud,” you end up with the current American reality: a country where many of us feel that we don’t have a voice, and that our vote doesn’t matter. That’s not true, but it’s closer to the truth than we’d like: the fact is that not all voices are heard, and not all votes have equal weight.

Is it really a surprise that U.S. voter turnout is so low compared to most other Western democracies? The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which has so far been signed onto by 11 states with 165 electoral votes between them, would finally start to reverse this trend. It would bring some measure of symmetry and empowerment back to presidential elections by committing all the electoral votes of its signatory states to the winner of the national popular vote. The Compact relies on the constitutional authority of each state to apportion electors as it sees fit, and it only takes effect when states with a majority of electors (270) have signed on. In other words, once the Compact takes effect, presidential candidates will need to care about “all” of our votes, because they won’t be able to win without a majority.

Connecticut should be the next state to commit to the National Popular Vote. Bills to accomplish that have been introduced in the Connecticut House and Senate. If you want your vote for president to count — equally — you should call your Connecticut representative and senator and ask them to support those bills. I’ll close with a bit of history: In 1969, both newly elected Republican President Richard Nixon and his narrowly defeated challenger, Democrat Hubert Humphrey, agreed on one thing: the Electoral College needed to be replaced by a national popular vote. “Direct election of the president would give each American citizen an equal vote — a fundamental principle of our democratic process,” wrote Humphrey. “The candidate who wins the most popular votes should become President,” said Nixon (who had himself just won the popular vote by 0.7 percent ).

The House agreed: in a bipartisan vote of 338-70, they passed a bill that would have amended the Constitution to replace the Electoral College system with a national popular vote. The bill was filibustered in the Senate, where it died.

Fast forward to 2017. An interstate agreement is gathering momentum to change the system. What’s more, we once again have a president who has spoken out against the Electoral College: “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy,” tweeted now-President Trump on Nov. 6, 2012.

I couldn’t agree more.