Visualizing the Representation Gap
By Kira McDonald Senior Fellow with Data for Progress
An abundance of recent commentary has noted a deep and growing electoral representation gap in the U.S. This representation gap is created and entrenched through various mechanisms—gerrymandering at the state and local levels, voter suppression, felon disenfranchisement, and others. But the most consequential are likely the oldest and most foundational: the Senate and the Electoral College.
Larger populations in some states are not reflected in the apportionment of representation in these bodies. As a result, voters in California have 1/67th the senate representation as those in Wyoming, while voters in Texas have 1/48th a Wyoming vote. In the electoral college, the inequality is still stark but orders of magnitude smaller, with Californians and Texans both having about ¼ of Wyomingites’ electoral college representation. And millions in non-state U.S. territories will have little or no national representation at all.
This data visualization explores this major and straightforward element of representational inequality in the three elected bodies of our national government.
Visualizing the Representation Gap
For the visualization, I quantify the representation gap as straightforwardly as possible: By dividing a state’s number of representatives or electoral college votes by its population. The resulting ratios are also normalized to a baseline state to determine relative “vote weights.” The vote weights can be understood as representation per person in a given state, relative to a baseline state.
The visualization is interactive. Choose an elected body of national government—the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the Electoral College—change the baseline state (where relative vote weight equals one)—and see how vote weights elsewhere measure up.
By default, the baseline state is Louisiana, which has the median population of all the states. The color scheme is uniform across all bodies of government. Colors become more or less dispersed based on your selection, ranging from purple to green to yellow for the Senate to a more compressed spectrum for the House.
Of course, the visualization doesn’t capture everything. Disenfranchisement and voter suppression determine who gets to vote and how easy it is for them to do so. The Electoral College relegates the presidential contest to battleground states, while marginal votes in solidly red or blue ones are discouraged and ignored. This map only shows one, easily-quantifiable aspect of the representation gap.
Is this just the Constitution?
If we have an interest in democracy, the representational inequality shown above would be completely untenable. There is no reason for one voter to have nearly 70 times the senate representation as another voter merely because they live in a different state.
This is a short piece, but it feels important to note at least some constitutional arguments in favor of addressing the undemocratic aspects of these institutions.
In a recent NYTimes op-ed, Jamelle Bouie noted that constitutionalist originalism grounded in a supposed authoritative meaning at the time of ratification is problematic, not only because the intentions of the founders were always fraught or contested, but also because the constitution at the time of various amendments, particularly during the Reconstruction, would be imbued with different “original intents.”
Similarly, although the constitution at ratification defined two Senators per state, the Reconstruction Amendments create a constitutional basis to address the abridgement of rights constituted in the current unequal apportionment of Senate representation and Electoral College votes—and this is an argument that has been taken up by constitutional scholars:
“From a purely textual point of view, then, Congress has been delegated power to protect voting rights based, first, on the principle of equality of all citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment and, second, on the prohibition of discrimination with regard to race, skin color, ethnicity, sex, and age. The Voting Rights Amendments taken together provide a strong textual basis for Congress to take action to correct a “denial” or “abridgement” of these rights in elections for federal office including the Senate.
Representational inequality stems in large part from slavery, and still disproportionately disenfranchises Black people. We may have not only a democratic interest in addressing representational inequality, but likely a constitutional one as well.