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Originally Posted by SecretMethod70
Putting this very simply: In a fully democratic election your vote is one of ~300 million. That means you have a 1 in 300 million chance of your vote being the one that decides the election. Under the electoral college system, using my home state of Illinois as the example, my vote is actually only one of ~7 million (and that's being pessimistic, considering that the total population of Illinois, regardless of voting eligibility, is ~13 million). That means I have a 1 in 7 million chance of my vote deciding who Illinois' 21 electors go to. Then, using admittedly fuzzy math, there's about a 21 out of 538 (~1 in 25) chance that my determining who Illinois' electors go to will also determine who wins the presidency. That means that my vote has about a 1 in 175 million chance of determining the election, instead of a 1 in 300 million chance.
(Yes, this is fuzzy math, but it gets the point across. The Electoral College is not a new issue: MIT physicist Alan Natapoff spoke to Congress on this issue back in the 70's, and his testimony is one reason why we still have the Electoral College today. And here's a link to his 1996 article in Public Choice.) |
Fuzzy, yes I agree with that. And I agree there is a statistical chance your vote maybe have more weight or have more of a chance of being the vote that tips the scales. But a statistical chance does not, IMO, equate to "increases the value of everyone's vote." If you increase the value of everyone's vote, everyone's vote is still equal. Thus everyone's vote has the same value and no one's vote has increased in value.
But that's not really what the EC does. The EC gives more weight to some votes while decreasing the value of other votes. Basically under the EC a candidate could lose every single vote in 39 states while merely winning the majority of votes in the 11 most populated states and end up in the Oval Office.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of..._by_population
And, as Rekna points out, you rarely see a candidate in states like South Dakota. And the reason for this is votes in those states don't have the same value as votes in other larger states.