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=== Not all votes count the same === Each state gets a minimum of three electoral votes, regardless of population, which has increasingly given low-population states more electors per voter (or more voting power).<ref name=":0" /><ref>{{cite web |date=November 2, 2008 |title=Op-Chart: How Much Is Your Vote Worth? Op-Chart |url=https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/11/02/opinion/20081102_OPCHART.html |via=The New York Times}}</ref> For example, an electoral vote represents nearly four times as many people in California as in Wyoming.<ref name=":0" /><ref>{{cite book |last1=Miroff |first1=Bruce |url=https://archive.org/details/democraticdebate00miro |title=The Democratic Debate: An Introduction to American Politics |last2=Seidelman |first2=Raymond |last3=Swanstrom |first3=Todd |publisher=Houghton Mifflin Company |year=2001 |isbn=0-618-05452-9 |edition=Third |url-access=registration}}<!--|access-date=October 6, 2015--></ref> On average, voters in the ten least populated states have 2.5 more electors per person compared with voters in the ten most populous states.<ref name=":0" /> In 1968, [[John F. Banzhaf III]] developed the [[Banzhaf power index]] (BPI) which argued that a voter in the state of New York had, on average, 3.3 times as much voting power in presidential elections as the average voter outside New York.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Banzhaf |first=John |author-link=John Banzhaf |date=1968 |title=One Man, 3.312 Votes: A Mathematical Analysis of the Electoral College |url=http://digitalcommons.law.villanova.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1780&context=vlr |journal=Villanova Law Review |volume=13 |pages=306}}</ref> Mark Livingston used a similar method and estimated that individual voters in the largest state, based on the 1990 census, had 3.3 times more individual power to choose a president than voters of Montana.<ref>{{cite web |author=Livingston |first=Mark |date=April 2003 |title=Banzhaf Power Index |url=http://www.cs.unc.edu/~livingst/Banzhaf/ |website=Department of Computer Science |publisher=University of North Carolina}}</ref>{{Better source needed|reason=The current source is a blog post and not peer-reviewed ([[WP:NOTRS]]).|date=October 2023}} However, others argue that Banzhaf's method ignores the demographic makeup of the states and treats votes like independent coin-flips. Critics of Banzhaf's method say [[Empirical evidence|empirically]] based models used to analyze the Electoral College have consistently found that sparsely populated states benefit from having their resident's votes count for more than the votes of those residing in the more populous states.<ref>{{Cite journal |last1=Gelman |first1=Andrew |last2=Katz |first2=Jonathan |last3=Tuerlinckx |first3=Francis |year=2002 |title=The Mathematics and Statistics of Voting Power |url=http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/STS027.pdf |journal=Statistical Science |volume=17 |issue=4 |pages=420β35 |doi=10.1214/ss/1049993201 |doi-access=free}}</ref>
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