Start with Congress. The House of Representatives is supposed to be the people’s chamber. Seats are divided among the states by population after each census. California gets many representatives. Wyoming gets one. That part sounds straightforward enough.
But the House has been capped at 435 members for nearly a century. As the country has grown, each representative has come to speak for far more people than the founders could have imagined. The House is still based on population, but it is less intimate, less local, and less directly representative than it was meant to be.¹
The Senate is stranger. Every state gets two senators. Not two senators per million people. Two senators, period. California, with nearly 40 million people, gets two. Wyoming, with fewer than 600,000, gets two. That was the founding bargain that persuaded small states to join the Union.²
This is not a technical quirk. It is one of the central facts of American government. The Senate confirms judges, approves treaties, blocks legislation, and can prevent constitutional change. A system created to protect states still protects states. The question is whether it now does so at the expense of equal citizenship.
Then there is gerrymandering, one of those wonderfully ugly American words.
Representatives are elected from districts. But in many states, the districts are drawn by state politicians. That means the people who benefit from the lines often draw the lines. The technique is simple: “pack” the other side’s voters into a few districts where they win overwhelmingly, or “crack” them across many districts where they lose narrowly. Either way, a party can win fewer votes and more seats.
The Supreme Court has recognized the democratic problem. In Rucho v. Common Cause, it said excessive partisan gerrymandering can be “incompatible with democratic principles.” But in 2019, the Court also said federal courts generally cannot decide partisan-gerrymandering claims.³
That left much of the fight to the states. Some states use independent commissions. Others let partisan legislatures draw the maps. More recent Supreme Court decisions have given state mapmakers additional room. In Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, the Court emphasized the presumption that legislatures act in good faith when drawing districts.⁴ In Louisiana v. Callais, the Court further changed the balance between the Voting Rights Act and constitutional limits on race-conscious districting.⁵
The legal details are complicated. The practical point is not. In the United States, representation often depends not only on how many people vote, but on who drew the map before they voted.
Now add the Electoral College.
Canadians elect members of Parliament, and the government emerges from Parliament. Americans vote for president, but not directly. Each state gets electoral votes equal to its House members plus its two senators. A candidate needs 270 of 538 electoral votes to win. Almost every state uses winner-take-all rules: win a state narrowly, and you usually get all of its electoral votes.⁶
This is how a candidate can become president while losing the national popular vote. It happened in 2000, when George W. Bush won the presidency after Florida was decided by 537 votes. It happened again in 2016, when Hillary Clinton won nearly three million more votes nationally, while Donald Trump won the Electoral College.