Exercise 1: How a State's Elector Count Is Calculated — Possible Solution
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This exercise is really about connecting two facts this course has
already established in earlier chapters, rather than learning a brand
new rule from scratch.

THE FORMULA
A state's number of electors equals its total representation in
Congress: its number of House seats (apportioned by population, per
Chapter 3) plus its number of Senate seats. Since every state, per
Chapter 3's own material on the Great Compromise, gets exactly two
senators regardless of population, a state's real elector count is:

  (that state's House seats) + 2

WHY EVERY STATE GETS AT LEAST 3 ELECTORS
Chapter 3 established that every state gets at least one House
representative, no matter how small its population is - a state
cannot have zero seats in the House. Combine that guaranteed minimum
of 1 House seat with the guaranteed 2 Senate seats every state gets
under the Great Compromise, and the minimum possible elector count for
any state works out to:

  1 (minimum House seat) + 2 (guaranteed Senate seats) = 3 electors

This is exactly why even the least populous US states still have a
real, guaranteed floor of 3 electoral votes, regardless of how small
their actual population is - the same two-senators-per-state principle
that gives Wyoming and California equal weight in the Senate (Chapter
3) also gives every state a real electoral-vote floor here.

WHY THIS MATTERS
Because the Senate-derived 2 electors are a flat number added to every
state regardless of size, they matter proportionally much more for a
small state's own total than for a large one. A state with only 1
House seat effectively triples its elector count once its 2 Senate-
derived electors are added; a state with 52 House seats barely moves.
This is the concrete mechanism behind this chapter's own finding that
the Electoral College inherits the Great Compromise's small-state
weighting, one level up from Congress itself.

ANSWER: A state's number of electors equals its House seats (based on
population, per Chapter 3) plus its two guaranteed Senate seats. Every
state gets at least 3 electors because every state is guaranteed at
least 1 House seat and, under the Great Compromise, exactly 2 Senate
seats regardless of population - 1 + 2 = 3, the real constitutional
floor for even the smallest state.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
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It derives the elector-count formula directly from two facts already
established in earlier chapters (House-seat apportionment and the
guaranteed 2 Senate seats per state) rather than treating it as a new,
disconnected rule, and shows the arithmetic that produces the real
3-elector floor.