Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine are high stakes players in Nov. 5 elections

With the 2024 election approaching and a select few states holding the fate of the presidency (and the economy) in their ballots, the personal-finance website WalletHub today released its report on 2024's States with the Most and Least Powerful Voters, as well as expert commentary. This report aims to highlight where people's votes matter the most, and thus where people have the biggest responsibility to make their voices heard.

WalletHub compared the relative clout of 2024 voters in the presidential and Senate elections. In order to make such a comparison, we calculated a Voter Power Score for each state, for both types of elections.

To view the full report and your state's ranking, please visit:
https://wallethub.com/edu/how-much-is-your-vote-worth/7932/



"No matter where you live, you should vote in the upcoming election, as it's your civic duty and gives you a chance to have a say in our political system. At the same time, it's evident that not all votes hold the same weight. The top five states where residents' votes will have the biggest impact in the 2024 election are all fiercely-contested battleground states: Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin. If you live in one of these states, you could quite literally have the fate of the election in your hands."

- Chip Lupo, WalletHub Analyst


Expert Commentary

What are the consequences of having so many gerrymandered, non-competitive House districts? How does this impact governance?

"The impact is to produce polarization among our elected representatives that exceeds the real differences within the electorate. In a great majority of congressional districts, the outcome of the general election is a foregone conclusion. So the only real threat that an incumbent faces is a primary opponent who will challenge them from the right if they are a Republican or from the left if they are a Democrat. So there is no incentive to tack to the center. Instead, representatives are pushed to the extremes in order to beat back primary challengers. That leaves few voices in the middle and makes bipartisan cooperation very difficult. As a result, we get gridlock and a coarser politics."
David Skidmore - Professor, Drake University

"Worse governance! Representatives feel beholden only to their primary electorate-- which can be quite extreme-- not to their constituents as a whole. They feel no need to represent the needs/values of all their constituents not to even be a competent legislator."
Steven Greene - Department of Political Science - North Carolina State University


Should there be a non-partisan federal commission to organize and supervise the voting process, or should voting procedures be left to the states?

"Yes. Most federal systems in the world are more centralized regarding the protection of political rights of citizens, including voting rights. Our system is still marked by the legacy of a 19^th century federalism that was wary of 'national' rights and left most important decisions on the rights of citizens up to the states. It took more than a century of struggles to centralize the legal protection of rights (e.g., the 'nationalization' of much of the Bill of Rights or the Voting Rights Act). However, on voting rights that centralization has been more partial than, say, the protection of property rights. Fairness in the design of local electoral laws and the administration of the voting process in U.S. states is, unfortunately, often left at the mercy of local partisan dynamics."
Edward L. Gibson - Professor, Northwestern University

"The Constitution clearly says that states decide the manner of their elections. In other words, registration and voter ID laws, mail in and absentee ballot regulations, recount and hand count procedures, polling location and times, and felon voting rights are denied by states. This creates a lot of unevenness of access to the ballot across the country. Federalizing national elections would close this gap, yet, it would require a change to the Constitution, which requires approval by 2/3 of Congress and 3/4 of all states. This is difficult enough even when Congress agrees on the change, and the chances of that are pretty close to zero. So, there is the normative argument that all people in the country should have truly equal access to voting, and then there is a logistical argument which illustrates how unlikely this is."
Dr. Suzanne M. Chod - Professor of Political Science; Director, Center for Social Impact; Coordinator, Gender and Sexuality Studies - North Central College


Should we reform how votes are apportioned in Congress (both the House and the Senate)? If so, how?

"That would require a change in the Constitution, which is most unlikely. There are other things that we can do instead that would be helpful. Getting rid of the Senate filibuster would allow legislation to move more easily. The Supreme Court could hold that partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional, or, short of that, individual states could set up non-partisan redistricting boards, as many do already. States could adopt ranked-choice voting, which creates incentives for candidates to move to the center rather than the extremes."
David Skidmore - Professor, Drake University

"This is a tricky one. If you pull one thread, the whole thing falls apart! Some political scientists advocate for increasing the size of the House from 435 to somewhere around 700. But, to do this, some also say we have to eliminate primaries and gerrymandering, and switch from a winner-take-all to a proportional representation system. This is a wholesale package reform that is not realistic nor would it solve all of our problems. The coordination issues that would arise from having such a large House would most likely get us right back where we are now: with two coalitions of members who do not agree on much. There is more widespread agreement that Senate should be reformed to be more representative. But, the question of how many senators there should be in total, and how we calculate the 'sweet spot' of senators by state population is much tricker. All of this, of course, changes the Electoral College voter per state, and opens up a completely new conversation!"
Dr. Suzanne M. Chod - Professor; Director, Center for Social Impact; Coordinator, Gender and Sexuality Studies, North Central College