JimC wrote: ↑Sun Jan 13, 2019 4:01 am
laklak wrote: ↑Sun Jan 13, 2019 3:09 am
Only in presidential elections, otherwise every vote is equal.
How about your Senate? Don't states get an equal number of senators each, regardless of their population?
Yes, but only citizens of that state get to vote for Senators for that state. So each vote for senator is equal.
There is nothing undemocratic in having a Senate representing states as political units. That's like how every country in the UN General Assembly gets one vote even though China has 1/5 of the world's population. Each "State" in the UN general assembly is a political unit.
Some parliamentary systems have upper chambers which are likewise not in direct proportion to population. The reason is that governments spread out representation across various stakeholders. And, a union of states means that each state is itself an entity. You wouldn't have a United States if the smaller, more rural states didn't have some protection or representation qua state units.
In Europe, for example, they have the European Parliament which works in conjunction with the European Parliament as a legislature. It has one minister per country. It's composed to represent the "member states."
https://europa.eu/european-union/about- ... ncil-eu_en It's not elected purely democratically, and if you compare each country's population, then each minister represents radically different population sizes.
“When I was in college, I took a terrorism class. ... The thing that was interesting in the class was every time the professor said ‘Al Qaeda’ his shoulders went up, But you know, it is that you don’t say ‘America’ with an intensity, you don’t say ‘England’ with the intensity. You don’t say ‘the army’ with the intensity,” she continued. “... But you say these names [Al Qaeda] because you want that word to carry weight. You want it to be something.” - Ilhan Omar