How much more does a Wyoming vote count than a Texas vote?
Every state gets at least 3 electoral votes no matter how few people live there. That floor means small states end up with far more electoral power per resident than large ones — a real, measurable, and lasting gap, mapped here across every state.
People represented per electoral vote — blue is fewer people per vote (more electoral power), purple is near the national average, red is more people per vote (less electoral power)
Most electoral power per resident
Least electoral power per resident
The floor of 3 electoral votes does the work. The gap between the most and least "weighted" vote is roughly 4-to-1, and it comes from the rules themselves, not an accident of any particular election.
Any system that guarantees every member a minimum share hands the most weight per person to its smallest members. The US Senate (two seats per state, whatever the size) and the UN General Assembly (one vote per country) work the same way.
Who gains when every member is guaranteed a minimum share?
Why small states get extra weight
Every state gets 2 electoral votes for its senators and at least 1 for a House seat, regardless of population — that floor is what gives Wyoming, Vermont, and the other smallest states outsized weight per resident. Meanwhile, the House has been capped at 435 seats by law since 1929, which keeps the total at 538 electors. As the country grows, each House seat, and so each large-state elector, has to cover more and more people.
Congressional apportionment (and electoral votes with it) is also only recalculated once per decade, on the 2020 census. States that have grown quickly since then — Texas among them — end up under-represented relative to their current population even before the small-state floor effect is considered.
Explore the same total-versus-rate split elsewhere
It is the same total-versus-per-capita gap as our car-theft exhibit: give every state, or every country, a fixed floor regardless of size, and whoever is smallest ends up with the most outsized share per person.
Related exhibits
Sources: electoral vote counts per state reflect the fixed 2020 census apportionment, in effect for the 2024 and 2028 presidential elections (538 total). Population figures are 2026 estimates (World Population Review, itself built on Census Bureau population-estimate methodology) — current population, not the frozen 2020 apportionment population, which is why the ratios here differ slightly from an "as of 2020" version of this map. State boundaries built from US Census Bureau county cartographic boundary data (via the US Atlas TopoJSON), merged into states in your browser. Both datasets are embedded directly in this page.