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A much discussed paradox of the 2000 Presidential election is the fact that despite winning the popular vote, Al Gore lost the election to George W. Bush. This is, of course, due to the fact that the president is not elected by a plurality of popular votes cast but rather by a plurality of votes of the 538-member Electoral College (EC). Each state, except for Maine and Nebraska, elects its members of the EC by a winner-take-all method, i.e., the winner of the plurality vote in a state is entitled to all the electors from that state.1 The only other winning candidate without a plurality of the popular vote was in the Harrison v. Cleveland election of 1888. While the 1888 election still produced a difference of 65 votes in the EC in favor of Harrison, the 2000 election was also very close in the EC. Only the 1876 Hayes v. Tilden election was closer in EC votes.
The size of each state's delegation to the EC equals the size of the state's delegation in the House of Representatives plus two for its senators. The reasons for this method of apportionment of the EC members are rooted in the Connecticut Compromise of 1787 (Kelly, Harbinson, and Belz 1970; Koppell 2000). Furthermore, the 23rd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1961, gives the District of Columbia the same number of members in the EC as the smallest state. Currently, this number is 3, the number of EC members for several states. Since the size of each state's EC delegation is equal to the size of its delegation in the House plus two, smaller states have a relatively larger representation in the EC than they would if EC members were apportioned based on the population size alone. For example, in the 2000 election the 22 smallest states had a total of 98 votes in the EC while their combined population was roughly equal to that of the state of California, which had only 54 votes in the EC. Of those 98 EC votes, 37 went for Gore while 61 went for Bush. These inequities are well known (Dahl 2002); we will not discuss them further here.
In 1941, the size of the House was fixed at...