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Comment by namarie | Hacker News Reader

> What if the votes of each age group were weighted

Because the principle of "one person, one vote" is widely (and correctly IMO) accepted.

In many places and for certain purposes (the US and the EU for instance), geographical regions have one vote, regardless of their population size.

It’s unclear that an age-based distribution instead of geographic distribution would be worse. But it would probably be unrealistic to achieve without basically completely upending existing political structures.

And this system wildly over-represents the landowning elites as a result

The EU isn't one country

The US is one country and disparate voting power between states(mainly in the Senate, to a lesser extent with the electoral college) is a real problem. I see little reason to make it worse. Although it's useful to rhetoric out how little sense the current system makes

The point of having both proportional and state-based voting is to incentivize both small and large states to stay in the union. The optimization is for political unity over perfectly representative democracy. It makes perfect sense when you consider the ideals and goals of its implementation -- that being a compromise in order to convince both small states and large states to cede large parts of their sovereignty to what at the time were effectively foreign nations.

This made sense back when the states were actually mostly self-governing polities, and there were relatively few pertinent issues on the federal level. But this is no longer the case today, and in practice, EC and Senate result in a "tyranny of the minority", where the minority can not only veto the majority's agenda, but actually push their own instead.

The small states who have excess control in the Senate cannot tyrannize the large states (except by maintaining the status quo), because the House of Representatives still exists. No new policy can get passed unless both a majority of states' representatives and a majority of the population's representatives agree -- if they disagree, the worst you get is gridlock, not "tyranny of the minority".

One person, one vote is proportional representation, which is not widely practiced.

What is actually practiced is 'One collection of zip codes, one vote.'

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