What, 12% of the population, 14% of the economy. 2% of the voting power in the Senate. Pretty similar for Texas, New York, Florida. Malapportionment is a disease.
Tying economic output to political power gets hairy pretty quickly. You incentivize states to put economic outcome before the wellbeing of the citizens and give states with rare natural resources more power than those that rely on value produced by a workforce.
In general yes, but all democracies have this guiding principle, including the EU, where small nations have much more electoral power per capita than larger nations.
For example, each Maltese member of the European Parliament is elected by 90,000 voters in Malta. Each German member is elected by ~878,000 voters in German, meaning each Maltese citizen has about 10x more power than each German citizen.
In this case, the German "bloc" is still vastly more powerful, but the disproportionate representation is important to ensure the loyalty of small nations, who are always incentivized to navigate much narrower interests.
I think they make an incredible amount of sense. The population centers don't deserve to dictate how the entire country works just because they pack a ton of people in. For the Senate, it's important to have a body where all the sovereign states get equal say, because after all they are supposed to be the primary unit of government. Not only that, but the fact that there's equal representation in the Senate is the social contract on which this country is founded, without which California wouldn't even exist.
The electoral college is flawed but I also find it better than the alternative. It's important that the president should represent a wide variety of perspectives in the country, not just pander to the population of the n biggest cities and call it a day. The people living in small or unimportant states deserve to have a president who gives a damn about them, too. Ultimately I think both of these mechanisms are important ones to ensure that the country doesn't turn into a classic tyranny of the majority, which is something I value quite a bit.
As it stands a person in California has less say than a person in Wyoming. Yes California as a group has more say but that is to be expected because it has more people.
Try New Zealand. 40% of our members of parliament are selected by the parties, without true voter representation.
Under MMP, 120 MPs are elected to Parliament — 72 are elected by just the voters in individual electorates around the country and 48 are from political party lists
I agree with you about many of those problems but those things are also true in any other US state. It’s not like Texas or Tennessee or Minnesota have huge HSR networks that California doesn’t.
Austin is quickly building more housing though, which I am a fan of.
