Recently (this is 2020), I've been seeing a surge of "Land doesn't vote, people do" sentiments w.r.t. the US's electoral college [1]. The sentiment, expressed mostly by supporters of the Democratic Party, is that the electoral college is unfair, because it weighs voters' votes in a way that gives a distinct advantage [2] to people from less populous states over more populous ones.
[1]In the United States, the president is elected not directly by the populace, but indirectly by means of the Electoral College ⬈. In this scheme, votes are collected at the state-level, and the state sends electors to vote on their behalf. Most states award all electors to whomever won the state-level popular vote; Maine and Nebraska split their electors by relative proportions.
[2]Assuming even voting probabilities, the vote of a Wyomingan is worth 3.72 times as much as that of a Californian.
Having lost multiple presidential elections in living memory despite having had the popular vote, this has generated some ire in the Democratic party towards the institution of the electoral college, and there's a rising popular sentiment to do away with it.
Setting aside the issue of whether the electoral college should be abolished, I want to address the sentiment directly: land does vote.
The size of the electoral college (538) is not arbitrary. It equals the size of congress, provided that the District of Columbia were a state. Each state has two state senators, and the 435 members of the House of Representatives (capped at that number in 1929 ⬈) are apportioned by population of the state, under the requirement that each state have a minimum of one.
The electoral college, in other words, represents an additive hybrid of two separate systems of representation: political and popular [3]. Each one has its own separate notion of fairness, and the combination of the two obeys its own; this is the reason it appears to be 'unfair' when compared against the standard of only one of its two halves. In a political union, each constituent polity (i.e. state) is equivalently powerful. In a popular union, each
constituent person is equivalently powerful [4].
[3]Where the popular system is given 4.27 times the weight (436 to 102).
[4]Up to a rounding error.
When a voter goes to the polls, they are effectively voting twice: once on behalf of themselves, and once on behalf of the state to which they belong. The idea that "land doesn't vote" comes from forgetting this second part.
For what it's worth, many Americans don't have a strong sense of state-identity. 41.5% ⬈ live in a state other than the one in which they were born [5] (excluding immigrants). The populists who call for the elimination of the electoral college, moreover, often fall further on the federalist-confederate spectrum, valuing nation-level authority over state-level authority.
[5]Interestingly, the states with the highest proportion of static residency include most of the traditional 'battleground' states: Iowa, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. These are the states that stand to lose the most if the political union were removed from the electoral college, in terms of sheer influence on the election's outcome. That they would also stand to lose the most in terms of state identity appears to be a peculiar coincidence.