On one hand, I agree with you that the impact of states with high voting power is somewhat mitigated by the fact that they're small, and the effect of the electoral college only comes into play in elections that are relatively close to begin with.
But on the other hand:
a) All recent presidential elections have been close in popular vote. And as the article points out, two of the last three presidents have won the electoral college while losing the popular vote.
b) Everyone would be appalled by any other large systematic difference in voting power, even if the overall impact was limited. Can you imagine if instead of going by state, we decided to go by income and the top 0.2% of people were given 3.6 votes each? People would lose their minds.
As for the math, I was using electoral votes divided by the voting-age population of each state in the 2010 Census. So, Wyoming is 3 EV / 0.428M = 7.0 EV/M and New York is 29 EV / 15.053M = 1.9 EV/M. If you use total population instead, you get the basically the same ratio (3.55x vs 3.64x).
But on the other hand:
a) All recent presidential elections have been close in popular vote. And as the article points out, two of the last three presidents have won the electoral college while losing the popular vote.
b) Everyone would be appalled by any other large systematic difference in voting power, even if the overall impact was limited. Can you imagine if instead of going by state, we decided to go by income and the top 0.2% of people were given 3.6 votes each? People would lose their minds.
As for the math, I was using electoral votes divided by the voting-age population of each state in the 2010 Census. So, Wyoming is 3 EV / 0.428M = 7.0 EV/M and New York is 29 EV / 15.053M = 1.9 EV/M. If you use total population instead, you get the basically the same ratio (3.55x vs 3.64x).