However, a second distortion in the Electoral College, the small-state bias, clearly favors the Republicans. Remember that the number of presidential electors allotted to each state is equal to the size of its congressional delegation: the number of representatives in the House plus the number of senators. Because the U.S. Senate heavily overrepresents sparsely populated states, the Electoral College has a modest rural bias of about twenty votes in the 538-seat college, which gives the Republicans a small but potentially decisive advantage. In 2000, for example, the small-state bias added an
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