Congratulations everyone, you did it. It probably didn’t seem possible, but you survived another election cycle. Enjoy the lack of political ads while you can–2016 will be here before you know it.
With the midterm elections in the rear view mirror and 2016 slowly appearing on the horizon, WalletHub, a finance social network, crunched the numbers to determine which states have the most and least powerful voters. In an ideal world, every vote would carry the same weight, but that’s not always the case.
“Although the U.S. is a democratic nation, ballots carry different weights based on the state in which one lives,” writes Richie Bernardo. “Take California, for instance. Its estimated population is nearly 66 times greater than Wyoming’s, yet each state has two seats in the Senate. In this case, less is more: California’s votes are weakened exponentially because each of its senators must represent tens of millions more residents.”
To determine which state has the most and least influential voters, WalletHub calculated the number of elected officials in the federal government per adult population in each state, says Bernardo. Each state was ranked in three categories: Senate elections, Presidential elections and House elections.
So how did Alabama fare?
The most powerful voters in the nation reside in Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota and Rhode Island. WalletHub notes that with an average rank of 22.25, red states have more powerful votes than blue states, where the average rank is 28.50.
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