[eherot]

The question is, if you’re going to design a system where 1 person != 1 vote, how can you argue that it is in any way more fair for someone’s vote to count double (or more) simply because they have chosen to live in a sparsely populated area? Why is basing it on the local population density a good method of deciding the strength of a vote?

[dionidium]

Because the United States is a collection of states. This piece seems to be missing from your analysis. It's not about rural vs urban. It's about being in a different state. That still matters!

An analogy:

Imagine a subdivision with 10 houses. Nine of those houses have a single person living in them. One house has a family of 15. When we go to vote on new rules in the subdivision, the unit of voting is the house. We don't let the family of 15 control the entire block.

It doesn't matter that this means those 15 people get the same vote as all the single people, because that's not the voting unit. The logical unit is the house. They can vote within their house about policy within the house, but they vote as a group on neighborhood policy.

This is federalism.

The unit is the state. Missourians combine to form a vote, just as Californians combine to form a vote, and so on. Individuals within the state vote individually on issues within the state. But they don't vote as individuals on national policy. Their votes are aggregated by the state in which they reside.

If this seems odd, it's only because modern Americans have largely stopped thinking of the United States as, well, a set of united states. But that's exactly what they are.

[eezurr]

This is a bad analogy on so many levels:

- The direct proximity and very small population allows changes to be discussed in person and in detail. A citizen of a nation is not able to discuss changes with his/her fellow citizens and develop anything meaningful out of those discussions due to this inability.

- The types of policy changes a small block of houses would vote on is almost NIL, with maybe an exception for HOAs.

- Your're analogy doesn't consider that that house of 15 people generates 90%[1] of the GPD of the subdivision. This isn't to say votes should be based on wealth generation, but rather to remind you that there's so much wealth generation there because of the larger population, and it's in the interest of everyone to create policies that facilitate the growth of the GPD (and policies that will attract and allow intelligent people of all nationalities and backgrounds)

- A family of 15 is still two parents, who count as two votes, not 15.

[1] 15/24 = 63% --> 63% * 50(states) = 31 states. The top 31 states generates 90% of the GPD

[dionidium]

> - A family of 15 is still two parents, who count as two votes, not 15.

As a sort of meta-point: it’s never useful to point out the ways in which analogies fail in this way. [0] You know exactly what is meant by the analogy, as does everyone else. This isn’t responsive or helpful. All analogies are leaky.

In general, I’d encourage you to try to find the ways in which an analogy may elucidate. Anybody with an ounce of motivation can note the ways in which they don’t. If you start with that motivation, you’ll succeed every time, to no particular end.

[0] All this does is send us into a back-and-forth where I shore up the analogy by specifying that the 15 are all adults, and then specifying that, yes, in this neighborhood that's allowed, and so on, until eventually we've hashed out every pointless detail of the electoral system in this fictional town.

[aurailious]

> If this seems odd, it's only because modern Americans have largely stopped thinking of the United States as, well, a set of united states. But that's exactly what they are.

Yes, this is exactly my point. The EC comes from an earlier time when the US are instead of the US is. But that has clearly changed. Its a vestige of a different form of governance. The power of government derives from the people, not the past. How people currently view the US is how the government should operate.

So using the EC as some excuse for resistance against mob rule is not only against its original intended purpose but also against what people actually want currently. People want the US to be viewed as the identity of the country, not the individual separate countries. People want to elect the President, they don't want the States to.

[dionidium]

Right, but I want to convince people that they're wrong to want this, which is why I'm arguing that they're wrong to want this.

[kcorbitt]

In 1850, the year California became a state, its population made up 0.4% of the country.

Today, Californians are 12% of the US population. It's just an accident of history that all those people happen to count as one "state" – if it were to join the union today as a collection of states of the same relative size as 1850 California, that would be 30 states. If it were to split into individual states each with the population of today's Wyoming, that would be 67 states.

So yes, the unit of federalism is the state. But the way state lines are drawn are largely an accident of history, so state-based representation feels pretty arbitrary.