There is a chart being passed around on Facebook stating that a vote in Wyoming is worth 380% more than a vote in California. To try to understand why somebody made that statement (and you may totally disagree with it) I did quite a bit of research on the electoral college. If you go to Wikipedia (I know not the best source but good for a quick review) article on the history of the Electoral College, you can see how the electoral college has been chosen has changed over the years.
At the birth of our nation, citizens voted directly for electors, trusting the electors to make the best choice for president. The winner with the highest number of votes became President and the second highest, VP. In 1796, John Adams (Federalist) became President and Thomas Jefferson (Republican), VP, so that was changed. The original constitution also allocated 2 senators per state and a number of representatives based on number of inhabitants in which slaves counted as 3/5s of an inhabitant. So the number of electors has always been based on the number senators and representatives in Congress (each state gets 2 electors for its two senators plus the number of representatives in House). In the early 1800s each state could determine how electors were chosen. In the later 1800s the parties got to choose their own candidates. I have condensed pages and pages. In the early 1820s,most states introduced the winner take all electoral votes concept. If you read the Wikipedia link, you can see how interests of small states versus large states, slave holding states versus mostly non-slave holdings all impacted the development of the constitution while balancing the desire of the Founding Fathers to maintain a republic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_States)
Congress regularly increased the number of state representatives until it was set at 435 in 1911 and has not been increased since (except when AK and Hawaii joined--two were added but later subtracted out.) These 435 representatives are allocated out to each state based on population determined by US Census every 10 years. Each state gets a minimum of 1 representative and the remained are allocated, not by direct proportion, but by some weirdly complicated formula that I thought somebody had hacked Wikepedia as a joke. But I confirmed on a .gov website.
https://www.census.gov/population/apportionment/about/computing.html
The chart shared on Facebook states that a vote cast in Wyoming is worth 380% (or 340 depending on what you read) more than a vote cast in California since CA gets 55 electoral votes and WY 3 (2 for each senator and 1 for representative, which is the minimum number a state can have. Vermont and North Dakota also have 3 electoral votes). Actually that number is higher. The number of representatives for California was set in 2010 when the CA population was 37,253,956 versus WY population of 563,626 . The current estimated population of CA is 39 million; whereas WY population is estimated at 587,910.
The number of representatives could be increased again to account for the corresponding increase in population. This would impact the presidential election because of different voting trends for rural versus urban, blue states versus red states, so each party as an opposing stake in this issue. And the smaller states want to protect their interests also. But a quick review of the history of the electoral college indicates that its evolution has always been impacted by large state versus small state, impact on political party, interest in political parties controlling who runs, etc.
I tried to write this in a politically neutral tone but recognize the above two paragraphs could be interpreted as having a Democratic slant, which I am. Hope this helps.
Chart is from Wikipedia.
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