A State That's Untouchable Like Eliot Ness

If you have the sense in your gut that the electoral college is an outdated piece of trash that has no place within a democratic system in which senators are elected, and non-property owners, women, and minorities can vote, but don't yet know quite why, recite this statistic to yourself over and over again:

33.7 million people live in California. California has 55 electoral votes.
26.6 million people live in the 17 smallest states (population-wise) and DC, combined. Altogether, these states and district get 67 electoral votes.

What does that mean? If you live in California, your vote for president is worth a fraction of the vote of someone living in Vermont or Delaware. It gets even worse in the legislature. Wyoming and California have precisely the same number of senators; so every single citizen of Wyoming gets something like 70 times more representation in the Senate than every single citizen of California. 15th Amendment, no?

(Incidentally, I challenge any defenders of the present system 1) to explain how this is fair; 2) anticipating the typical boilerplate about how smaller states wouldn't count if not for the electoral college, explain why it's necessary to violate the equal protection of the citizens of populous states in order to protect citizens of small states; and 3) explain how (2) isn't exactly the same logic that makes some of us find many affirmative action policies so repulsive.)

Fortunately, salvation is at hand. All that populous states have to do is game the system the same way small states have been doing lo these many years. And that can be accomplished simply by dissolving the large states into smaller states. This blogger blazes the trail, detailing how California could divide into 23 separate states that would all be more populous than Wyoming. Fuck you, Wyoming! Just imagine: effectively 46 senators from California, 20-30 from New York, etc., and finally, something like every citizen's vote for president counting (almost) the same. (And don't bother me by pointing out that there would still be disparaties. A 25% difference in the raw value of a vote is different in kind as well as degree from a 7000% difference.)