In about 20 years, half the population will live in eight states (2018)
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
But this is HN, so let's throw some numbers in to see how badly it's skewed already.
The state with the lowest population-to-elector is Wyoming, with about 193,000 people per elector. The state with the highest is Florida with over 740,000 people per elector. So Wyomingans votes for president are over 3.8x more valuable than Floridians.
The national average is around 580,000 people per elector, and Louisiana is pretty darn close, so I'm going to omit them from calculations. That leaves about 217,000,000 people in states that are higher (Georgia, California, Iowa, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Washington, Maryland, Missouri, Oregon, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Colorado, North Carolina, and Florida), and 106,000,000 people in states that are lower (the others).
I'm too lazy to list out common political affiliations, but they're not as clearly biased as you'd expect.
Do you think Malta's number of representatives should be cut to match the UK's, in which case it would have (less than) one member and any minority votes on Malta would be hopelessly lost and ignorable? Do you think the UK (and others) should be boosted to match Malta, in which case the EU parliament would have eleventy thousand representatives? Do you think some other scheme else would be better?
We have a similar discrepance in Norway, BTW, where it basically doesn't matter. The least populous region has historically had less that 2% of the population and about 3% of the parliament seats, but the numbers are very small, haven't made a difference, and of course the issue exists precisely because the numbers are so small, so it can never grow to be a big discrepancy.
I'd assume that in the case of heavily skewed results the micro-states wouldn't matter either way. I suspect it wouldn't matter as much in the cases where the vote was close. But having an actual tie would give them their influence.
I mean, I could see it being insulting. And I could see the argument that most of the time their vote doesn't matter, but most of the time most peoples' votes don't matter anyway.
First, suppose that in Malta, there is a political party that has majority backing, or near-majority. In this case, the Maltese will look at an EU election reform that gives Malta a single seat, realise that the big party will win every election in the coming decades, and say "WTF is this? Why should we even hold elections if we already know the outcome? This isn't democratic, I'll be no part of this."
Second, suppose that in Malta, there is no political party close to majority backing. In this case, the Maltese will look at an EU election reform that gives Malta a single seat, realise that the winning candidate will never have wide popular support, and say "WTF is this? Why should we even hold elections if no winner will have popular backing? This isn't democratic, I'll be no part of this."
Sometimes people suggest avoiding the problem by not having such small places. However, Malta does exist. If there were a reform proposing to merge Malta's EU votes with Italy's, the Maltese would look at it and say "WTF? Why should we even hold elections if the representative will always be a party hack from Rome who doesn't even speak our language?"
AIUI the common way to solve this is to give really small places about five or six seats, so that winning 20% of the votes is enough. That transforms an existential problem of democracy in the small places into a small skew in the elected body.
The Presidential election is the single most important election in the US federal system, but in any case, he skew in the electoral college is less than, and mostly a a side effect of, the skew in the upper house of Congress (there is skew of a smaller scale in the lower house do to granularity effects, which also impacts the electoral college, but the skew in the upper house is a much bigger issue.)
The Presidential election decides the most important single seat in government. However, Congress is, by design and intention, the more powerful federal body and so congressional elections collectively are more important.
The senate gives 2 representatives to each state, irrespective of population. It’s essentially already government control by the smallest states - you have tiny states with 2 senators, when Washington DC has none - despite a larger population than a number of states.
PR, Guam, and American Samoa have no representation.
And the majority of those tiny population states are rural states that consider science to be secondary to whatever the Bible says.
The tyranny of the majority is a concern, but the tyranny of a small minority is more of a concern.
One way to mitigate this would be to increase the size of the house to around 700 members. (But that isn't going to happen either.)
Eventually, we will have to have another constitutional convention to correct the imbalance. Heaven help us then.
That won't mitigate it. Who gets to confirm judicial appointments? The Senate, not the House.
> Eventually, we will have to have another constitutional convention to correct the imbalance. Heaven help us then.
Yeah. I'm not sure that a constitutional convention is what I want to see. One good thing that could come from it is confirming that the 10th Amendment actually means what it says, not what it's been interpreted to mean. Or (perhaps the same thing) that the Commerce Clause is not the blank check that it's been interpreted to be. In my view, those would be good. But a lot that's bad could also come...
The other way to do it would be a constitutional amendment. For that to happen, you'd have to get 3/4 of the states to ratify it. For that to happen, they'd have to decide that they'd be, at least, no worse off under the new system. Building a new system where the Senate doesn't confirm judges (or where the Senate is per-population instead of per-state), and still leaving the less populated states no worse off... what are you going to give them in exchange?
Removing the advise and consent power and moving it to the house is a good idea which would mitigate the judicial problem.
Only in America do we think that the party that won the election shouldnt be able to actually run the government.
That's how some governments work some of the time. Even in modern democracies governments often entrench some values which they purposefully make difficult for a majority to overrule, and this is not something that America came up with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermajority
No presciptive statements have been made in this comment.
Somehow, I'm always able to view Washington Post articles without logging in or anything, but I know others seem to have trouble...
http://statchatva.org/2019/02/11/national-population-project...
What is interesting is that despite their prediction of half the population living in 8 states, their prediction is that half of those states will have either lost population or have gained less than 200,000 people within the next 20 years (Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan)!
Edit, I am sorry, but I misinterpreted. The 4 states I mentioned are in their prediction of the 10 states with the highest population. Only Pennsylvania and Illinois are predicted to be among the 8 most populous states.
I think the fed should give companies incentives to move to unpopulated states that actually want to grow, instead of handing out tax cuts like free candy.
I find it very, very scary however in terms of what it means for our political system. If half of the US population controls only 16 senate seats, and the other half controls 84 seats, how does the senate have any democratic legitimacy at all?
We don't need the Senate to be the House. We already have the House for that.
If you think that the Senate is the problem, that more House-like behavior is what we need, then what it says about you is that you don't understand the point behind the American system of government. The point was to not have too much direct democracy. If you don't understand why that was the point, yes, that says something about you.
The House is the democratic side, as the number of representatives is proportional to population.
The combination of the two is important to help maintain balance of power.
...because the lower-population states didn't want to be over-powered. Hence, a balance. If you wanna change the bargain, give the little guys a chance to leave.
God how I would love to change the bargain. I see zero path forward.
Whatever the motivations, though, it seems like a reasonable (while certainly imperfect) balance to me. The Senate is the deliberative body of the state governments, the House is the deliberative body of the people. I think both are important in order to balance between governmental tyranny and the tyranny of the popular majority.
Tyranny of the majority is certainly a danger we should take measures against. Things like the Bill of Rights achieve some of that.
But equating the smaller states with the minorities that need protection seems to me an unjustified leap of logic. The small states are largely controlled by giant extractive corporate ventures like agriculture or mining. Giving those states more power merely tilts the game further in favor of those already-powerful monied interests.
I agree, but I don't think this arrangement is counter to that.
> The government should not split its time between serving them and serving itself.
The thing is that "the government" is not a single body. Every state has its own separate government, which operates much like its own tiny nation. The federal government is nothing more than the states coordinating with each other.
Having a deliberative body for the state governments themselves makes a great deal of sense to me in this context for a whole lot of reasons. Doing so is not "the government serving itself", it's each state government serving its population.
That, in isolation, would be dangerous, though, so the Senate has to work with the House, which is the body for the people directly, not the states. We wouldn't want just the House in isolation, either, because that would also be dangerous.
- Drug legalization (e.g. recreational cannabis)
- Build public transportation
- Build walkable cities
- Fund the arts and culture