“THE conception of political equality from the Declaration of Independence, to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, to the Fifteenth, Seventeenth and Nineteenth Amendments can mean only one thing  one person, one vote,” the Supreme Court ruled almost a half-century ago. Yet the framers of the Constitution made this aspiration impossible, then and now.

Under the Constitution, electoral votes are apportioned to states according to the total number of senators and representatives from each state. So even the smallest states, regardless of their population, get at least three electoral votes.

But there is a second, less obvious distortion to the “one person, one vote” principle. Seats in the House of Representatives are apportioned according to the number of residents in a given state, not the number of eligible voters. And many residents  children, noncitizens and, in many states, prisoners and felons  do not have the right to vote.

In House races, 10 eligible voters in California, a state with many residents who cannot vote, represent 16 people in the voting booth. In New York and New Jersey, 10 enfranchised residents stand for themselves and five others. (And given that only 60 percent of eligible voters turn out at the polls, the actual figures are even starker.) Of all the states, Vermont comes the closest to the one person, one vote standard. Ten Vermont residents represent 12 people.