Contrary to what a writer says in the letter “Illegal immigrants and the Electoral College” [Aug. 27], the number of electors in the Electoral College is not based on population, at least not directly. The number of electors each state gets is equal to the number of senators plus the number of representatives that the state has in Congress.
The process for determining that total number is quite complicated. First of all, each state, regardless of population, gets two senators and thus two electors, then each state gets at least one representative. It is the rest of the 435 members of the House of Representative who get divided up based on the census, that is 385 seats.
There is a complicated formula for assigning those seats. Each state gets a priority number, and the 385 seats go to the states based on those priority numbers until those 385 seats are exhausted. The population of each state does figure into the formula cited above and so does affect the number of electors that each state gets, but the impact is mitigated by the previous allocations based on number of senators and the minimum of one member of the House that each state gets regardless of population.
The significance of the effect of population size is further diminished by the fact that both red states and blue states have illegal immigrants living in them. Also, almost all the states give all their electors to the candidate who wins the state, whereas it could be (as it is in at least two states) that the electors are distributed based on districts won. This further complicates any calculations about the significance of counting illegal immigrants in the census.
Finally, note that the census count that is used is the most recent one. This means that any illegal immigrants that enter a state for the next 10 years are not having any effect.
Based on this, it would be hard to determine if illegal immigrants have any significant effect on the outcome of an election. However, the fact that they may is another good reason to get rid of the Electoral College and finally let the people decide by popular vote who their president will be.
John Guenther
Greenfield