The Senate...Wyoming vote 67 times more powerful than California's etc

I cut/pasted this answer from Quora. I think it gives a solid rebuttal to those who want a wholly direct vote.


Cristian A. Rodriguez, Autonomous at Industrial Maintenance (2011-present)
Updated 13h ago


I am from Argentina. Here we have that system you want in the US. One person, one vote, majority wins, the dictatorship of majority.

You think Argentina is doing well?

The problem with that is that politicians will have no incentive to balance the interests of the whole country and will only focus in the important districts, the ones that have more population. As for the rest, they will not care, they are irrelevant. They will exploit them and use their taxes to pay for the megacities so the cattle (voting people) are happy and keep voting for them. No one cares about the rest of the people, they are not people, their votes don’t matter.

You’d be better to keep it the way you have it now. If you do total singular voting counts like in Argentina, you will end up having the largest cities dictating the government.

The problem with that is that they will focus only on those massive urban centers and leave the rest of the country abandoned, since they don’t need their votes.

In Argentina the political classes have encouraged overpopulation in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires, this way it holds 1/3 of the country’s population.

They filled the slums with poor people and imported more poor people from other countries with high fertility rates while giving them subsidies. Thus they have bought votes and keep those people dependent on state aid, to use them as voting cattle.The l

The last election in October proved this. The Kirchners won the election again; they will release all their high-ranking officers now in jail for proven corruption cases.

They won because they focused on the most populated area. The area that is most dependent on state aid.

The Matanza and Tigre districts in Buenos Aires have more power from votes than all the other provinces.

Macri won the election in all the productive provinces that have most of the industries, agriculture, exports and the most educated people. The provinces that pay the most taxes to the state.

He lost because the Kirchners won in districts that have no productivity and high unemployment with high state-given subsidies and the lowest education levels.


If you get to see inside the blue provinces that voted the Kirchners, district by district, you will see that the ones that pay the most taxes and have most economic production voted for Macri, and the good-for-nothing overpopulated districts voted for Fernandez.

Those yellow provinces have around 13/14 million people and are the leading economic and exporting economies of the country with the highest living standards. The blue ones are the least productive provinces, the north ones are plainly feudal states with landlords owning everything and have been perpetuating unlimited re-elections by fraud (each province has its own government).

Buenos Aires province has about 15 million people alone. Is the largest economy in the country.

But the most populated districts are the least economically developed. La Matanza is like a country with four million people and is the district that always gives the Peronists their victory.


Fernandez won by two million votes, exactly the votes in those districts in blue, the poorest and most highly populated.

So think again about letting the most populated cities in the US dictate the government. It would be a disaster. The politicians will only care to keep those people voting and screw the rest.

Here in Argentina we are tired of getting poorer every day paying more and more taxes to sustain that ballast holding us down while they leach off our work to keep the others voting for them.

 

This argument is bunk. Bolded is literally the opposite of fact. The interests of the country as a whole is the interests of the poeple as a whole. The current system caters to land, not people. I don't care about the interests of land

 

The Senate was designed to be unrepresentative so changing that is a pretty hard sell.

I think a smarter and easier thing to do is to work on expanding the number of seats in both the House, Senate, and even Supreme Court.

Keeping the ratio of seated officials to citizens lower is good because it 1) reduces their power proportionately 2) makes it harder for votes to be bought and 3) reduces the day-to-day volatility of the government.

 

The right thing to do is to get Puerto Rico and DC statehood but as long as the GOP has any say so that won’t happen because of the grasp on power they know they have.

Unfortunately the only short term solution is for people to move to these states to shift voting power. Dems if they win in 2020 should focus their energy on incentivizing companies like clean energy co’s to move to these states and bring in people to grow these cities and voters.

 

I definitely think the Senate should remain as it is. I am okay with changing the electoral college. That way the small states still get a say in the Senate. But for presidential votes, every person's vote would carry the same weight.

 

Good take Donny. I actually agree with this. Another point is the more seats, the more chance 3rd parties can start grass root efforts into getting into the senate. With the Senate and Presidency an exclusive club, it snuffs out any real chance of grass root efforts in the House and state and local government.

On the discussion at hand, I am not sure why there are those who simply want to jump from the EC straight into direct democracy. Splitting EC votes in states will happen long before direct democracy and it accomplishes pretty much the same thing.

 

The Senate is fine as it is. The primary building blocks of this country are the states. When they sit down at a table together to decide what to do together, it should be as equals. California shouldn't be bossing Montana around just because it has more people in it. There's a lot of wisdom in how the forefathers set the distribution of power. Don't want to chuck it out to solve a temporary problem.

 

Solid point. I would be curious to see what effect increasing the number of House seats would do to Gerrymandering.

 

Ug, the 'voting apportionment' is EXACTLY EQUAL, by design and intent. Each stae has exactly 2 senators, so each senator represents exactly half i their state.

The claimed issue is in fact precisely why the Senate exists at all...to counter the impact more populous states would otherwise have. Prevent the tyranny of the majority.

If youb don't like that...move to Wyoming, and apparently become 67 times more important, by your own argument.

Or change the Constitution...which won't happen because the less populous states will never pass it.

 

Electoral college get rid of it, leave the senate alone.

DD

 

I remember the days when Rove and the rest really believed they were building a permanent conservative majority back in the aughts. Y'all remember that organization, Moral Majority?

Now that conservatives have decisively lost this round of the culture wars, the republican nominee for pres has won a majority of votes once in the last forty years, and the demographic writing is on the wall, we see a new vocabulary: "the tyranny of the majority." It's a shocking surrender in ideological competition. Conservatives seem very aware of their minority status and instead of trying to compete in a marketplace of ideas, hope to continue their minority rule through structural inequality built into the constitution.

 

America is a minority rule nation.

For at least twelve of the last twenty years, we've had a chief executive who won the electoral college but received fewer votes than their opponent.

Those executives have appointed countless federal judges and several important supreme court justices, thus leaving a huge influence on another third of the co-equal branches of government.

Republican state legislators have shamelessly gerrymandered their districts, ensuring that the votes of democrats are weakened as far as possible, electing more representatives to state legislatures and the house of representatives than the actual percentage of vote reflects, this leaving a huge influence both on state governments and on the last third of the co-equal branch of federal government.


If the shoe were on the other foot, and y'all conservatives lived under eight years of president Gore who received a hypothetical minority of votes, and for four to eight years a hypothetical president Hillary who received a hypothetical minority of votes, and these presidents appointed countless liberal federal judges and supreme court justices, and democrat state legislatures solidified their rule of individual states through gerrymandering, you would all be crying for bloody revolution in the streets. Liberal cries of "but the constitution!" would be waved away without a single thought.

 

This was more tenable when there were only thirteen...

 

I think it is ok.

The Wyoming vote is more powerful to senate member, not to people. The senate is not working for people anyway. In the end, each vote has equal amount of power: zero.

 

I'm confused about your terminology. Even if we didn't have a electoral college, we would still have a representative democracy.

A direct democracy from what I know is something like a town hall were citizens actually vote and create legislation.