At the core of democracy lies a simple principle—that all votes should count equally. This principle is violated by the way we elect our president. Because of the winner-take-all system of allocating Electoral College votes, the only votes that count are those for the person who wins the state in which they were cast. More concretely, every four years millions of U.S. citizens have their votes discarded simply because they are not in the majority in a particular state.

Contrary to what most people might think, the winner-take-all allocation of electoral votes is not in the Constitution. It was adopted by 48 states to give themselves more power in the presidential election. Equal Votes was a crowdfunded legal challenge to the winner-take-all method for allocating Electoral College votes. Based on the “one person, one vote” principle already articulated by the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore, we argued that winner- take-all is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause that ensures all of us, and all of our votes, must be treated equally under the law. Ultimately, the federal courts ruled against us.