If you live in California, your vote in the Senate is worth about 1.5 percent of the vote of someone who lives in Wyoming.
California’s population at 39,536,653 is 68 time greater than Wyoming’s at 579,315. Is this extraordinary difference in voting power what our founding father’s intended? The simple answer is yes but not to this extent.
If asked what form of government we have I think most people would answer a democracy or perhaps the technically more accurate term “representative democracy”. We elect Congressman and Senators to represent us in Federal law making. We ascribe to the concept of one man, one vote. Yet, the reality is that our system has never followed one person, one vote in practice. In fact, it is hard-wired to prevent this type of equality.
During the Constitutional Convention the founding fathers struggled with how to allocate seats in Congress. One approach was that both houses be allocated purely by population but small states feared they won’t have a reasonable voice in such a system. The Connecticut Compromise was adopted in which the House seats are allocated by population (although not as equitably as you might think) and each state gets two Senators. The compromise was a purposeful over representation of small states.
From the beginning small states were given disproportional power. However, was it intended to be 68 times greater voting power? The 1790 Census reveals that the variation in state size was far less at the start of our country than it is now. The most populous state in 1790 was Virginia with almost 11 times more people than Rhode Island, the least populous state. So at the start of the country, the voting power gap was approximately 11 fold. Over the years, this power gap has ballooned to 68 fold.
This voting power gap truly tips the scales too far in the direction of small rural states. In addition, I believe it would require a new constitution to change. So this is not changing in the foreseeable future. How we elect the House and the President can be more easily altered and currently both these systems also favor the low population states.
Our demographic growth patterns have fueled a widening representation gaps. In turn, the increased power of the mid-west and rural western states helps explain how we have been pulled so far to the right and out of line with national thinking. The founding father’s worried about the tyranny of the majority. Today, we need to be concerned about the tyranny of the over represented minority.