re: #342 Obdicut

I’d have to see the actual math on it, but since West Virginia has 5 electoral votes, about 2 million people, and California has 55 votes with 40 million people, that means that a West Virginian’s vote counts about twice what mine does in terms of electoral votes.

So an eyeball of it says that you’re wrong, unless you look at it from some very odd perspective.

The point is that the chances that WV’s 5 votes will swing the whole outcome are minimal.

In a little test model I just cooked up, where there are 98 states, each like WV, and one CA, as CA goes, so goes the nation, about 87 percent of the time.

So your individual chance of swaying the election is almost equal to the chance that you sway CA, and that’s about 1 in 4000, assuming 16 million Californians vote.

Your chance of swaying an election in WV is about 1 in 1000, give or take, so that’s four times as big. But WV is more than 4 times as unimportant.

Does that help?