3 ms·

I'm much more on board with equal area boundaries than equal population.

notacoward 9y ago
Why? Acres don't vote. People do. Dividing by area will just keep "one person, one vote" from being true, as long as we assign two senators (and thus two extra electors) per state. What's the benefit, other than giving each rural voter more power than each urban one?
- Glyptodon 9y ago
  To me your view of "one person, one vote" sounds more like a new kind of colonialism - a way of making it so that the concerns of less population-dense areas are ignored and population-dense areas basically exert hegemony over them. Even if not a single person lived in Alaska it would deserve representation. Likewise, if just native tribes lived in Alaska it would not be appropriate for everything in the whole area be dictated by non-natives somewhere else just because more people lived there. While I view our current situation and system as imperfect, I do think one of its redeeming characteristics is the attempt (not really successful) to create a system that can both protect from the tyranny of the majority and the tyranny of locality. Equal population redefinition seems likely to merely exacerbate urban/rural tensions and vast geographic differences and create more conflicts. On the other hand, equal area represents a cleaning up of our current system - Senators would now clearly represent something: land/area, apportioned equally, as a more appropriate check on a hypothetical population-only apportionment of a house of Reps, which should have its size uncapped so as to have the proper granularity for purely population based representation.
  - notacoward 9y ago
    > concerns of less population-dense areas are ignored As I said, areas don't vote. People do. Why should ten people living on a hundred acres get more representation than ten people living on one? Painting "one person one vote" as colonialist is flat-out dishonest. It's the alternative that's discriminatory, treating some people as more deserving than others because they own more land.

Why? Acres don't vote. People do. Dividing by area will just keep "one person, one vote" from being true, as long as we assign two senators (and thus two extra electors) per state. What's the benefit, other than giving each rural voter more power than each urban one?

Glyptodon 9y ago
To me your view of "one person, one vote" sounds more like a new kind of colonialism - a way of making it so that the concerns of less population-dense areas are ignored and population-dense areas basically exert hegemony over them. Even if not a single person lived in Alaska it would deserve representation. Likewise, if just native tribes lived in Alaska it would not be appropriate for everything in the whole area be dictated by non-natives somewhere else just because more people lived there. While I view our current situation and system as imperfect, I do think one of its redeeming characteristics is the attempt (not really successful) to create a system that can both protect from the tyranny of the majority and the tyranny of locality. Equal population redefinition seems likely to merely exacerbate urban/rural tensions and vast geographic differences and create more conflicts. On the other hand, equal area represents a cleaning up of our current system - Senators would now clearly represent something: land/area, apportioned equally, as a more appropriate check on a hypothetical population-only apportionment of a house of Reps, which should have its size uncapped so as to have the proper granularity for purely population based representation.
- notacoward 9y ago
  > concerns of less population-dense areas are ignored As I said, areas don't vote. People do. Why should ten people living on a hundred acres get more representation than ten people living on one? Painting "one person one vote" as colonialist is flat-out dishonest. It's the alternative that's discriminatory, treating some people as more deserving than others because they own more land.