representation….

If you live in Wyoming, your vote for president counts four times as much as your vote would count if you lived in Texas.  Also, your representation in the Senate is 70 times greater than if you lived in California.

With our system of government, we award electoral votes based on the number of senators and representatives in Washington.  In the case of Wyoming, there is one representative, while there are two senators.  Representatives are based on population, but Senators come two to a state, no matter the population. 

Wyoming only has a little over 500,000 in population, or about one electoral vote for every 175,000.  Texas, on the other hand, has 34 electoral votes for its over 20,000,000 residents.

This sort of representative distribution doesn’t seem like a big thing, unless you look a little closer.

Today, California and Texas struggle with border issues everyday, having to feed and clothe and employ both legal and illegal immigrants.  In many cases, these costs are borne by the state, when protecting the border is a federal responsibility.

If you’re a senator from Wyoming or Montana or South Dakota or Idaho or Vermont, or New Hampshire, or Rhode Island, or Alaska, or North Dakota, or Kansas, or Delaware, or West Virginia or Kansas, why would you vote to pay for greater border protection if it doesn’t directly affect you? 

And, even though the collective population of all of these states represents about 30% of California and Texas’  population combined, they represent 26 votes against the the four votes of the two states.

So, in order to get spending bills for California and Texas, some real back scratching and horse trading has to happen.  If you wonder why bills get so bloated from pork barrel projects, this is where it starts.