Should Large States Be Broken Up?

After the recent election, I began wondering how the US can allow someone to be elected with less than half of the popular vote. It comes down to the US constitution and how the electoral college was set up. Each state gets one elector for each representative and one for each senator. The representatives are allocated according to population based on a decennial census, but each state automatically gets two senators. This gives more weight to small and rural states.

In the 2016 election, New York and California voted overwhelmingly for Clinton, but much of the midwest went tepidly for Trump. The apportionment of electors among the states meant that Trump won all the electors in states that voted for him. Most of those states were smaller and more rural than New York and California, so were weighted more heavily in the electoral college.

I have been thinking about how to change the apportionment of electors. One obvious way is to apportion part of them according to congressional district and the remaining two by the entire state. This is the way that Maine and Nebraska apportion theirs. The problem with that is gerrymandering. If one party controls the state legislature, they get to determine how congressional districts are drawn. For example, in North Carolina, Democrats control 3 districts out of 13 (23%) in the114th Congress, but 44% of voters voted for a Democrat. The solution here would be to pass laws outlawing gerrymandering, if it could only be defined. There are practical solutions to reduce the problem. One is to have a non-partisan, elected commission draw congressional district boundaries. California, Arizona, Idaho, and New Jersey have these.

The more interesting option for making the electoral college more in line with the popular vote would be to break up the states. If the system has a bias against large states, then maybe we should break them up into smaller states. California has 55 electoral votes, Texas has 38, while Alaska and Wyoming have three. If we take a rough limit and say that each state should have about 10 electoral votes, then California gets broken into 6 states and Texas into 4. The interesting thing is that the law that brought Texas into the union provided for breaking it into 5 states, though that law is likely null and void.

I have been working on dividing the largest states into smaller states of about 6 million people each, each getting about 10 electoral votes. I will post my results when done and take a look at what it means for the 2012 and 2016 elections. I can't go back to 2008 because the apportionment of electors was different before the 2010 census. This is what I have so far. I will probably redo these and work on New York, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois.