This is an out of context quote from a politics thread, to illustrate my point:
I have heard this sentiment often - for whatever reason, the assertion that we should have {one person = 1 vote = the same representative ratios for all} is often rebuked with something along the lines of “well then the city will have all the power”. Well, if 80% of a state lives in a city, then 80% of the deciding power should come from the city - no?.
I understand that in the US system, states get representation due to their former status as independent countries. But even there, a counterargument to removing the senatorial advantage is often about urban areas getting too much influence. I think most of the states have a county based senate that does this same thing at the state level.
I have even heard people say “the president can be elected with only these 10 states” and imply that it is a bad thing - but those 10 states have well over 50% of the population. If that was the way the vote went, why would it be any less fair than any other electoral college outcome. I think the fact that we have had a few elections where the winner got less popular vote than the loser is far worse.
So the question is:
Why does a large amount of land make the people living there deserve more representation?
My understanding of the issue is that most of the area of the US has very different governing requirements then cities so to let people that have no idea about what is required to manage a diffuse population could cause major strife across large swaths of the country. In order to allow the people who understand the needs of these areas best have a say in picking who runs the country they need to vote by land mass rather than population.
It makes sense to me now that I live on the outskirts on LA life here has nothing in common with how everyone moved around when I was living in the four corners and to have politicians only care about policies that would better New York and LA would cause strife in my little old county of 60k.
Nobody said anything about changing the constitution, in fact, I said I understand the historical reasons for the Constitution. I am asking why land has voting power outside of that particular construct.
Please come back when you would like to participate in THIS thread.
A recent cracked article pointed out that we have a deep-seated cultural meme that rural people are just better than city people. All of the cultural touchstones have city people (or equivalents, like castle people, or space station people) as the bad guys, with down home country folk as the good guys. So it’s only natural that their votes should count more – don’t you think that Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru should be weighted more than Admiral Piet and Grand Moff Tarkin?
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My understanding of the issue is that most of the area of the US has very different governing requirements then cities so to let people that have no idea about what is required to manage a diffuse population could cause major strife across large swaths of the country.
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So why do you assume that cities have no idea about what is required to manage a diffuse population (and that would cause chaos) but the fact that farming folk have no idea how to run a city is no impediment to their imposing their will?
Why should they? Because that was the deal that was made. That’s the only answer you’re going to get. That was how The Union was formed, and without that deal, no Union (or so the Framers figured). You don’t get to renege on the deal just because it produces a result you don’t like.
According to this Wiki article (which is based on the US census), 80% of all people in the USA live in a city. When you look at the degree to which each state is urbanized, they unsurprisingly hover around this value with some states like Maine being less than 50% urban and others like Nevada almost 95% urban.
I don’t believe it is accurate to say the advantage is based on areas that are predominantly urban versus rural. It is based on states that are relatively sparsely populated versus densely populated.
The result is a Presidential candidate could have extremely enthusiastic support in one part of the country, but the individual effect of this support is diluted because of the proportion of population per electoral vote. This seems extremely unfair to me. I live in NY state and according to this site - vote power of the 50 states - my vote is worth 1/4 the vote of a person in Wyoming in the Presidential election. This is compounded with the fact each of my NY state legislators represent more people than those of Wyoming and I have the same number of Senators. You could also make these comparisons for the solidly red state of Texas when compared to Vermont, or purple New Hampshire to purple Florida.
I’ll quote you but answer both questions directed at my responce. I don’t believe that our current set up causes the city dwellers to be overridden. It’s not like Pennsylvania or Ohio or Michigan or Florida are rural states considering that the least of them is number 9 in population. The purpose is to give the rural states a more equal voice.
Some issues that are vastly different are the impacts on land owners for federal decisions. For instance in Wyoming most land owners are also mineral rights owners so that most landowners are excited to bring oil and gas on to their properties while in the city is it a shame that destroys neighborhoods. For instance in LA most oil fields are built indoors so that the people around do not know they exist while in Wyoming a 1000 buffer is all that is typically required and sound design protection during the loudest operations.
On the other end of the spectrum in order to make life easier for the farmers and ranchers the EPA ruled that any water less then 10,000 ppm saline is considered fresh. No farmers would water their crops with this water since it’s dangerous and the ranchers won’t go over 5,000 ppm. So due to lack of understanding the use case the federal government created rules that accomplish pretty much nothing except making life harder on people.
It’s not just a rural vs city issue in the US. States like California, Texas and New York are not only big because of cities, but they are also literally big. Even if you discounted urban populations, they’d still have more people than smaller states.
So I’d dispute part of the premise of your question: I don’t think it’s a feature of the system that land or rural people are presumed to be better. Rather, I think it’s just a compromise about how to distribute assets when the need for some assets are based on population (think health care and schools) and the need for other assets are based on land (think roads and power lines).
Furthermore, think about military bases or IRS centers. A rural area can use these to develop a new population center, but if votes send all of them to the already-big states, it makes it harder to grow. They need military bases to grow population centers even more than a state that already has population centers.
Not that we want smaller or rural states to have too much power… but neither do we want New York and California hogging all the government contracts. We don’t want the interstate highways in Kansas to be dirt ruts in the middle of corn fields.
Would we arrive at the same compromise today? It’s hard to say, but it is a system that slightly over-represents smaller states while still giving larger states a bigger say and I wouldn’t be surprised if a modern compromise looked similar.
I don’t have a link because one of my colleagues gave a presentation on it at work. But I believe one reason is to avoid the phenomenon of creating “imperial cities”. IOW, cities that dominate their regions by taking in resources without providing much in return.
So I think the idea was to give rural areas a bit more influence so that the cities don’t create policy that allows them to dominate or neglect the rural areas.
An extreme fictional example of this can be found in Hunger Games
One could argue that the masses in the city rely on the rural farmers and ranchers in order to not die of starvation, so the country folk should get their due.
And if I am a Republican living in Delaware or a Democrat living in Wyoming, my vote essentially counts for nothing, because my state and all 3 of its electoral votes will always go the other way. I live in a district that is pretty well locked into not representing me in Congress, so voting against that guy is pretty futile. Party politics has made voting meaningless in practical terms.
I mean, if I were to cast the deciding vote in an election, what does that mean? Exactly half the voters in that election are pissed off and half are celebrating. What is the value in that?
Again, I am not discussing the current US constitution. There are probably a half dozen open threads about the US constitution, please argue about that in one of those.
I am certainly NOT trying to find justification to renege on a deal.
I am asking why it is that the idea that urban areas should get less representation than rural people is spoken of as though it is plainly and obviously true. The only reason I brought up the Constitution is that even there, where there is no need for this argument, people use it.
Why are people afraid of urban areas having natural majorities? I have heard this in so many contexts, and I am trying to find where it is from and if it is really a common myth. The quoted text was using that line as justification for something else, and I have seen this kind of thing a lot. That particular quote says “inner city” - is it just a dog whistle?
The reiterate the things mentioned by some of you:
There is a “rural is better people” bias
There is history within the US that some people may back-logic into this
There are places outside of the US where city-centered power results in rural people having no lights.
The first two reason strike me as very american ideas - is there the same pro-rural bias in other countries? What are the attitudes in Canada and Australia?
Clearly Octopus has never heard the things I have, is this an experience only I have had? Is there a common anti-rural representation bias that I have missed?
No state does this. They used to, but they aren’t allowed now. That kind of system was struck down by the Supreme Court, because “Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests.”
If we had a food-based system, California would have a lot more electoral votes.
When you are building a diverse federation, compromises have to be made to get everyone in it. Look at the UN. Each nation gets one vote. There’s no proportional representation at all there. Few nations would agree to be in the UN if that was the case. same goes for the US. There are a few states that would be thrilled with a purely proportional system. The majority would head for the exits.
This California seperatist movement thinks that Oregon and Washington will join their new states. Yeah right. Only if there was a legislative body in which Oregon and Washington had one vote each and California just one vote. Otherwise, the nation of Pacific West or whatever they called it would basically be California and two vassal states.
It should be noted that the concept of each state getting equal representation in at least one legislative body, and to get as many electoral votes as they have members of said bodies, is considered so inviolate that you can’t even amend the Constitution to change the senate part of it. Doing that invalidates the entire contract, and all states are free to decide not to join a new one.
Sure, but this just underlines the fact that this system was concocted as a compromise in a world where “voter” meant “white male landowner”. Lots of groups have special interests unrelated to their physical location that can be neglected by focusing too much on the majority. LGBT people, ethnic minorities, religious minorities, and so on.
LGBT people aren’t endemic to any region of the US, and are at the mercy of a land-based system built by privileged people whose biggest concern was their farm and whether they could get a voice in over the city dwellers. Sure, they may be more concentrated in certain blue areas, but that’s largely because they move there because they’re blue more than they became blue because of LGBT people.
These groups, whether they be LGBT, black, minority religious, or anything else, have had to rely heavily on the courts to enforce their rights. But when we were drafting our system nobody was making noise saying “us black people aren’t going to vote to support the formation of the union unless we have some assurances we won’t be screwed over by all you white people.”
Rural dwellers, farmers, and people who own a lot of land certainly have special interests that deserve to be represented, but there’s nothing about their needs that means they need to have their voices weighted in the legislation moreso than other groups that don’t get the same treatment.
And yes, for some populations you can do something akin to legalized gerrymandering to band-aid fix the situation. Majority-minority districting laws are an example of this, but it doesn’t work for every minority, and in the case of the current Electoral College and Senate is pretty meaningless due to their generally statewide nature.
