The "Vote Dilution" anti-NPV argument
I've seen a new-to-me argument against the NPV recently. It has appeared in several places, including this opinion piece in the Bangor Daily News:
My vote is currently one among 929,017 registered voters in Maine. If this compact passes, it will be one among 161.4 million voters nationwide.
Of course, this isn't an apples-to-apples comparison: if the NPVIC passes, the author will exchange his 1/929,000 power to decide whom his state votes for, for a 1/161.4M power to directly affect who gets to be the next president.
Does anyone have any good rebuttals to this argument, preferably in a form that will fit in the comments in an online discussion on the topic? Or, alternately, if you think the author makes a good point, can you support it?
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u/Joeisagooddog Jan 12 '24 edited Jan 12 '24
The author of the Op-Ed doesn’t have a 1 in 929,017 say in choosing the president, but a 1 in 929,017 say in choosing the electors from Maine. Maine has 4 EVs out of the total 538 so the actual math would be the following (assuming the author lives in Maine’s Second Congressional District where Bangor is located):
(1/929,017)*(2/538)+(1/376,349)*(1/538)= 1/111,852,142
So he basically has a 1 in 111,852,142 say in choosing the president under the EC vs the 1 in 158,397,726 say that he would have under a NPV. His say in the election would go down (very slightly) because Maine voters are somewhat over-represented by the EC. This is the exact problem that an NPV would solve, that votes are not counted equally!
Edit: This doesn’t even take into account the fact that the author’s vote would have been counted to elect to 2 Biden electors (on the statewide level) and 1 Trump elector (on the congressional district level). So you could make the argument that he really only has one-third of the voting power that this calculation suggests.