Your vote should be worth more

Your vote should be worth more Tenley Stiyer/DAILY Our government was built on the principle of adequate representation: the idea that elected officials should know and reflect the needs of the people they serve. When the House of Representatives was established in 1789, this system worked. Each district held roughly 60,000 people, small enough for a representative to understand their community and for constituents to be heard. Today, districts average 761,000, too large and varied for one person to speak for.  Winner-take-all elections dilute the power of voters further, as votes for losing candidates change nothing and those voters are left without a voice in Congress. The Electoral College extends this problem to the presidency, where the winner takes all the votes in nearly every state. Ranked choice voting offers a fix, since a vote for a losing candidate moves to the voter’s next choice. Restoring the promise of adequate representation requires making every person feel represented, and that means expanding the House, adopting ranked choice voting as the national standard and abolishing the Electoral College. At the heart of this issue is a basic question: Are we adequately represented by our current system? The answer is no. Until the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, Congress periodically increased the number of seats in proportion to the increases in population. In 1929, the House of Representatives was capped at 435 members and has remained unchanged since. This means that the U.S. has the same number of representatives as it did when it had about 200 million less people, increasing the distance between voters and their representatives. The larger a district is, the harder it is for a single representative to reflect the diverse ideologies and needs of their constituents. One district can stretch across cities, suburbs and farm towns — communities that rarely want the same things, yet one person is expected to speak for all of them. This comes at a time when lawmakers are becoming harder to reach: Between 2017 and 2024, town halls between legislators and their constituents fell by 70%. As congressional districts grow, it becomes harder for constituents to have their voices heard. Michiganders witness firsthand how this affects them. After the 2020 census, our state dropped from 14 congressional districts to 13. Although the state’s population exploded between 2010 and 2020, Michigan lost representation after redistricting. One proposal to bridge this divide is the Wyoming Rule, which would divide the total U.S. population by the population of the smallest state to determine the size of Congress. If put in place today, this system would add about 140 seats, bringing the House to 582 and cutting the average district to about 590,000 constituents compared to the current 761,000. Under this formula, Michigan would gain five seats rather than losing one.  Expanding the House would not shift the power between states, as each state’s share of the seats would stay proportional to its population. What changes, however, is the relationship between the representatives and the people they serve. Smaller districts mean a more accurate voice in Congress, and expanding the House under the Wyoming Rule is a necessary start to improve representation in the U.S. However, this is only one piece of the representation puzzle. Better representation should also include giving voters more options at the polls, which can be achieved through ranked choice voting. Under a ranked choice system, voters rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate secures a majority of votes, the last place candidate is eliminated and the voter’s next choice is counted. This process repeats until someone has majority support. Ranked choice voting would fix the spoiler effect, in which a third-party candidate changes the result of an election by simply running. In the 2000 presidential election, former President George W. Bush won Florida by just 537 votes, while nearly 97,000 Floridians voted for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader. As the Green Party is a left-leaning political party, it is likely that a majority of these votes would have trickled down to former Vice President Al Gore in a ranked choice system, giving him the win in this election. With ranked choice ballots, those voters could have both backed their first choice and still have a say in the final outcome. New York City, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Cambridge and other U.S. cities have used this system for local elections for years, and advocates say it can increase voter turnout. Voters like this system, too: 76% of New Yorkers want to either keep or expand it.  While proposals such as the Wyoming Rule or ranked choice voting affect how many voters each representative serves and how fully each vote counts within a single race, neither can single-handedly fix the biggest imbalance in American elections: the Electoral College.  A vote in Wyoming carries roughly three times the weight of a vote in California. Giving people more power purely because of where they live is not democratic. This system turns much of the country into an afterthought in federal elections. Candidates spend most of their time and resources in a few swing states while voters in safe states are ignored. By abolishing the Electoral College and using the popular vote to decide elections, each vote would be counted equally. Each person would have one vote, rather than each person contributing to a state worth a certain amount of electoral votes. This system would also incentivize candidates to reach potential voters in deep red or blue states, who are currently overlooked due to living in a strongly partisan location.  While these changes would increase the representation, options and equity for voters, they would not be easy to implement. Expanding the House would require every state to redraw its congressional map, adopting ranked choice voting would require re-designing ballots and abolishing the Electoral College would demand a constitutional amendment. There are also many challenges when it comes to adopting these systems in the first place: since 1800, there have been more than 700 proposals to reform or eliminate the Electoral College, and none have passed. Some barriers, however, are lower than they appear. The size of the House is set by law, not the Constitution, and states already redistrict every 10 years. Ranked choice voting has spread to multiple cities without a national push, and the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact offers states the option to pledge electoral college delegates to the national popular vote winner, thus creating a feasible and workable path around the Electoral College, without a constitutional amendment.  Although these measures would be hard to achieve, that is no reason to accept a system that leaves millions of voters unheard. Together, these reforms confront the same flawed system from multiple directions, putting power back into the hands of the individual voter. Your vote should be worth more, and it is up to us to demand a system that makes it so. Broderick Justian is an Opinion Columnist focused on the intersection between American politics and modern culture. He can be reached at bjustian@umich.edu Related articles