Paper · May 2026
The Submerged Electorate
Winner-Take-All Allocation and the Structural Dilution of Minority Votes in “Safe” States (Mississippi and California, 2020–2024)
Cody Hall (Independent Research)
Abstract
A companion to “Safe States, Silent Voters” (Hall, 2026), which showed that partisan safety suppresses aggregate turnout, this paper asks who bears the cost. We argue that the winner- take-all (WTA) allocation of electoral votes does not merely depress participation; it structurally dilutes the political leverage of voters whose preferences diverge from their state’s statewide majority, a population concentrated among racial and ethnic minorities in non-competitive states. Using certified Federal Election Commission and state results for 2020 and 2024, validated-voter vote splits (Pew Research Center, 2025; Catalist, 2025), and a formal model of the marginal electoral utility of a ballot, we examine two contrasting “safe” states: Mississippi, the state with the highest Black population share in the country, and California, the largest and most diverse Democratic stronghold. In Mississippi, we estimate that roughly 366,000 Black Democratic votes in 2020 translated into zero of the state’s six electoral votes. In California, the same mechanism erases on the order of three million minority Republican ballots and renders more than 1.5 million Democratic votes mathematically surplus. The pattern is symmetric across the partisan divide, which indicates that vote dilution is a structural feature of the allocation rule rather than a partisan artifact. We further show that WTA shields dominant state parties from the national electoral consequences of localized turnout suppression, and we evaluate the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC), now enacted in 19 jurisdictions holding 222 electoral votes (National Popular Vote, 2026; NPR, 2026), as a remedy that would make every minority ballot a uniform fraction of the decisive national total.
Summary
• Winner-take-all erases the losing side completely. In any state, every vote for the
statewide loser, plus every winning vote beyond the threshold needed to win, produces zero
1marginal electoral votes. In a “safe” state the losing side is the same bloc every cycle, so a
fixed, identifiable population is submerged election after election.
• Mississippi (the density case). Black residents are about 38% of the population and 37%
of eligible voters, the highest share in the nation, and roughly 93% of Black Mississippians
backed the Democratic candidate in 2020. Because the white majority votes Republican, all
539,398 Democratic votes in 2020, an estimated 366,000 of them cast by Black voters, yielded
zero of the state’s six electoral votes.
• California (the volume case). Because the state is locked Democratic, the roughly 6.08
million Republican ballots in 2024, a large share cast by Latino and Asian voters, were erased,
while about 1.6 million Democratic votes beyond the winning threshold were rendered surplus.
Conservative minorities and progressive minorities alike are structurally ignored.
• The dilution is bipartisan and therefore structural. The system submerges progressive
Black voters in the South and conservative minority voters on the coasts through the identical
mechanism. WTA also shields dominant state parties from the national cost of localized
suppression, since a state casts its full electoral allocation no matter how many of its citizens
are kept from the polls.
• The NPVIC changes the math. With every ballot entering a single national tally, a vote
in Jackson, Mississippi carries the same weight as one in Philadelphia, and depressing any
group’s turnout directly shrinks a party’s national total. We assess the compact as the leading
proposed remedy while presenting the principal scholarly objections to it.
Data Provenance & Ingestion Integrity