Should Rural votes be weighted/count more than Urban votes?

[San Lumen]

This is an idea that comes up frequently in the American politics and Canadian thread but it could be applied to any country.

The argument is that is unfair to base representation on population and instead rural areas should get more to balance it out. Its even been suggested that one house be based on population and the other by county or something else. I don't see how this is fair or democratic. Dirt, trees, crops and cattle don't vote. Just because someone grows food or lives in a small town doesn't entitle them to more representation.

Lets use two examples to show how unfair this proposal is. Nevada and Manitoba.

In Nevada you have 16 counties and one independent city. Clark County is 73 percent of the population and if you add in Washoe which is Reno and about 15 percent. The rest of the state outside these two counties is desert and small towns. I have nothing against small towns but a proposal like some have suggested of the lower house is by population and the upper house is by county which seems to be the most popular is completely unfair and undemocratic. Why should Nevada's smallest county of Esmeralda home to a little over 700 people have the same amount of representation as a county of 2.2 million? 10 percent of the population would always control the upper house.

In Manitoba 55 percent of the population is in the capital city of Winnipeg and therefore they get the most seats in the provincial legislature. In what way is it fair or democratic to have the rural areas of the province get more representation than them?

In statewide or provincial election its been suggested that to win you should have to get a majority of counties or municipalities to be elected? Again I ask in what way is this fair? Why should someone who gets less votes be elected and how can they claim a mandate when the majority did not vote for them?

You could even bring this to local level as some have and its been claimed that those who didn't vote for someone in an area that overwhelmingly leans to one party or another doesn't represent that minority. This could be applied to legislative districts or constituencies as well as some have done.

What do you think NSG? Is this a valid point?

[Rusozak]

They already are weighted. It's called the House of Representatives and the Electoral College. A single rural vote has always carried more weight than a single urban vote. It's just balanced by the sheer number of urban votes.

[San Lumen]

They already are weighted. It's called the House of Representatives and the Electoral College. A single rural vote has always carried more weight than a single urban vote. It's just balanced by the sheer number of urban votes.

Electoral college yes as it favors rural states. House of Representatives not really as its based on the population of each state. The Senate is increasingly becoming unrepresentative due to the outdated two per state rule.

[El Lazaro]

No, this is too complicated. If you want to override unfavorable elections by adding random rules, just give me one billion votes. I promise to use them responsibly on behalf of the highest bidder.

[San Lumen]

No, this is too complicated. If you want to override unfavorable elections by adding random rules, just give me one billion votes. I promise to use them responsibly on behalf of the highest bidder.

I don't disagree. This is more an issue of people not liking the outcome of elections so they want it rigged int their favor. You could also use Australia as a great example. Most of the population is on the coast and the interior of the country is small towns and desert.

[Kohr]

The urban-rural divide is only one axis on which Americans are divided demographically. Americans are also divided by race. By occupation. By income. By gender or sexuality. An urban person might have more in common with a rural person based on one of those other dimensions than they do with many of their fellow urbanites.

So weighting rural voters more favorably is silly and always has been.

[Floofybit]

If the rural voters agree with me, yes.

[San Lumen]

The urban-rural divide is only one axis on which Americans are divided demographically. Americans are also divided by race. By occupation. By income. By gender or sexuality. An urban person might have more in common with a rural person based on one of those other dimensions than they do with many of their fellow urbanites.

So weighting rural voters more favorably is silly and always has been.

You could make the same argument for almost any country. I used the province of Manitoba in Canada but here's another example. The state of South Australia has 77 percent of the population in the capital of Adelaide. Should the areas outside the city have more representation than them?

[Kohr]

The urban-rural divide is only one axis on which Americans are divided demographically. Americans are also divided by race. By occupation. By income. By gender or sexuality. An urban person might have more in common with a rural person based on one of those other dimensions than they do with many of their fellow urbanites.

So weighting rural voters more favorably is silly and always has been.

You could make the same argument for almost any country. I used the province of Manitoba in Canada but here's another example. The state of South Australia has 77 percent of the population in the capital of Adelaide. Should the areas outside the city have more representation than them?

I'm pretty sure you're on the same side of this debate as me. Because my argument doesn't change if you change the country.

[The True Sith]

Up until recently, most people didn't get to vote. And a little before that, no one voted. Even today, many people don't vote. And when voting systems were first established, they were not rights. That's why so few people were afforded the PRIVILEGE to vote, it had to be the people who know what the issues are and educate themselves on current events, and people who contribute to the society. Only recently did voting get redefined into a right, which is inane because if everyone votes then you get exactly where we are today with hyper-partisanship and corruption.

[San Lumen]

Plus Australia is another great example to use. In most of the provinces the capital is the largest city and contains the majority of the population. Should their National Parliament and state parliaments be redrawn to favor the rural areas?

[Nilokeras]

This is an idea that comes up frequently in the American politics and Canadian thread but it could be applied to any country.

Because you pop up like a haunted jack-in-the-box clown whenever any mild criticism of first past the post systems is uttered and bring it up, unwanted.

The argument is that is unfair to base representation on population and instead rural areas should get more to balance it out. Its even been suggested that one house be based on population and the other by county or something else. I don't see how this is fair or democratic. Dirt, trees, crops and cattle don't vote. Just because someone grows food or lives in a small town doesn't entitle them to more representation.

People live in the real world, where geography and association dictates the formation of communities. Those particular communities, by dint of their shared geography, often have similar needs from their government. That's why we elect representatives for particular places in space, to represent those communities. Obviously rural communities are quite a less dense on the landscape than urban ones, but they're still communities. And it's why we try to balance seat counts between urban and rural places to maximize the representation those communities have.

This really is your brain on neoliberal atomization: collapsing down politics to individual voters and running headlong into the idea that communities are what we're capturing with the design of legislative representation like a truck full of watermelons into a cement divider.

[San Lumen]

This is an idea that comes up frequently in the American politics and Canadian thread but it could be applied to any country.

Because you pop up like a haunted jack-in-the-box clown whenever any mild criticism of first past the post systems is uttered and bring it up, unwanted.

The argument is that is unfair to base representation on population and instead rural areas should get more to balance it out. Its even been suggested that one house be based on population and the other by county or something else. I don't see how this is fair or democratic. Dirt, trees, crops and cattle don't vote. Just because someone grows food or lives in a small town doesn't entitle them to more representation.

People live in the real world, where geography and association dictates the formation of communities. Those particular communities, by dint of their shared geography, often have similar needs from their government. That's why we elect representatives for particular places in space, to represent those communities. Obviously rural communities are quite a less dense on the landscape than urban ones, but they're still communities. And it's why we try to balance seat counts between urban and rural places to maximize the representation those communities have.

This really is your brain on neoliberal atomization: collapsing down politics to individual voters and running headlong into the idea that communities are what we're capturing with the design of legislative representation like a truck full of watermelons into a cement divider.

How would you draw the seat lines in many Australian states?

Sydney for example is 66 percent of the population of New South Wales. Perth is almost 80 percent of Western Australia.

[Dazchan]

Plus Australia is another great example to use. In most of the provinces the capital is the largest city and contains the majority of the population. Should their National Parliament and state parliaments be redrawn to favor the rural areas?

1. Australia doesn't have provinces.
2. Every electorate in the Australian House of Representatives serves an area of roughly equal population, and the electoral boundaries are redrawn every election to maintain this.
3. Given that everyone in Australia is equally represented, what would be the benefit of giving rural votes a higher weighting?

[Ostroeuropa]

This is an idea that comes up frequently in the American politics and Canadian thread but it could be applied to any country.

Because you pop up like a haunted jack-in-the-box clown whenever any mild criticism of first past the post systems is uttered and bring it up, unwanted.

The argument is that is unfair to base representation on population and instead rural areas should get more to balance it out. Its even been suggested that one house be based on population and the other by county or something else. I don't see how this is fair or democratic. Dirt, trees, crops and cattle don't vote. Just because someone grows food or lives in a small town doesn't entitle them to more representation.

People live in the real world, where geography and association dictates the formation of communities. Those particular communities, by dint of their shared geography, often have similar needs from their government. That's why we elect representatives for particular places in space, to represent those communities. Obviously rural communities are quite a less dense on the landscape than urban ones, but they're still communities. And it's why we try to balance seat counts between urban and rural places to maximize the representation those communities have.

This really is your brain on neoliberal atomization: collapsing down politics to individual voters and running headlong into the idea that communities are what we're capturing with the design of legislative representation like a truck full of watermelons into a cement divider.

Broadly this. The only alternative I can think of would be a consociational system where we explicitly recognize categories of communities and require "At least X%" of their representatives support a particular bill if it's relevant to their sphere of interests. Or just radically decentralizing everything, but that runs in to some issues.

A stakeholder democracy might get around it, but frankly, anybody who cares to do so can play six degrees of kevin bacon to insist everything impacts them somehow so they're a stakeholder. So it's either overrepresent rural voters, or go consociational.

The degree to which you demand consociationalism would be the degree of protection for those community interests balanced against gridlock. "If you can't find at least one rural rep to back your bill, it probably doesn't deserve to pass, even though you insist it's absolutely vital." V "You need at least 50% of them as well" at the extreme end. All of this is extremely technical, complicated, and also explicitly enshrines certain protections and privileges for rural communities as opposed to fudging it and just saying "Everyone gets one vote" and pretending we're not putting out thumb on the scale in terms of how many votes per rep there are.

[Nilokeras]

Because you pop up like a haunted jack-in-the-box clown whenever any mild criticism of first past the post systems is uttered and bring it up, unwanted.



People live in the real world, where geography and association dictates the formation of communities. Those particular communities, by dint of their shared geography, often have similar needs from their government. That's why we elect representatives for particular places in space, to represent those communities. Obviously rural communities are quite a less dense on the landscape than urban ones, but they're still communities. And it's why we try to balance seat counts between urban and rural places to maximize the representation those communities have.

This really is your brain on neoliberal atomization: collapsing down politics to individual voters and running headlong into the idea that communities are what we're capturing with the design of legislative representation like a truck full of watermelons into a cement divider.

How would you draw the seat lines in many Australian states?

Sydney for example is 66 percent of the population of New South Wales. Perth is almost 80 percent of Western Australia.

Here are some rules I just came up with all by myself right now:

- As far as practicable, the number of electors enrolled in each federal electoral division in Western Australia at the projection time would not be more than plus 3.5 per cent or less than minus 3.5 per cent of the projected enrolment quota.

- The number of electors enrolled in each federal electoral division in Western Australia would not be more than plus 10 per cent or less than minus 10 per cent of the redistribution quota in relation to each proposed federal electoral division, give due consideration to:

community of interests within the proposed federal electoral division, including economic, social and regional interests
means of communication and travel within the proposed federal electoral division
the physical features and area of the proposed federal electoral division, and
the boundaries of existing federal electoral divisions in Western Australia

[Nilokeras]

and tbqh, this whole kerfuffle about urban-rural representation seems like a particularly American vice that has far more to do with the fact that you're probably the last Western democracy left that leaves drawing political boundaries to explicitly partisan processes than any rural bias.

[Washington Resistance Army]

Yes. Death to the urbanite, power to the countryside, etc etc.

We should actually just shift to RCV or Approval Voting

[Senkaku]

The urban-rural divide is only one axis on which Americans are divided demographically. Americans are also divided by race. By occupation. By income. By gender or sexuality. An urban person might have more in common with a rural person based on one of those other dimensions than they do with many of their fellow urbanites.

So weighting rural voters more favorably is silly and always has been.

You could make the same argument for almost any country. I used the province of Manitoba in Canada but here's another example. The state of South Australia has 77 percent of the population in the capital of Adelaide. Should the areas outside the city have more representation than them?

Can Adelaide enforce proportional representation on the countryside, if it came down to a contest of force? Disproportionate rural representation is just a peacetime mathematical approximation of how hard it is for urban centers to exert control over their hinterlands. I’m open to the idea that loitering munitions, drone swarms, long range missiles, modern surveillance, and heavy artillery could reduce the independence of rural areas, but I really don’t want to test it— do you?

Yes. Death to the urbanite, power to the countryside, etc etc.

We should actually just shift to RCV or Approval Voting

Approval voting? You’re like the ur-Washingtonian bourgeois reactionary lol, between this and your stances on LGBT politics you could take over from Danny Westneat

[Ostroeuropa]

You could make the same argument for almost any country. I used the province of Manitoba in Canada but here's another example. The state of South Australia has 77 percent of the population in the capital of Adelaide. Should the areas outside the city have more representation than them?

Can Adelaide enforce proportional representation on the countryside, if it came down to a contest of force? Disproportionate rural representation is just a peacetime mathematical approximation of how hard it is for urban centers to exert control over their hinterlands. I’m open to the idea that loitering munitions, drone swarms, long range missiles, modern surveillance, and heavy artillery could reduce the independence of rural areas, but I really don’t want to test it— do you?

Yes. Death to the urbanite, power to the countryside, etc etc.

We should actually just shift to RCV or Approval Voting

Approval voting? You’re like the ur-Washingtonian bourgeois reactionary lol

In support of your first point, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland are overrepresented in the UK parliament even more so than rural voters. Probably because exerting control without consent on those areas would prove basically impossible, even more so than hinterland control. The same logistical challenges but with nationalism thrown into the mix. And while the international community might prop up a regime trying to bring order to its countryside, they're more likely to balk at it trying to do so against another "Nation" even if its not independent (Yet).

Wales for example is the highest density castle area in the world because of the difficulty in subduing the population, which is the medieval equivalent of what you're noting the alternative is.

13 castles per square mile.

Every square mile, needed 13 military installations, to pacify the area. It's kind of insane to think about. And even then, the Glyndwyr Rising showed it wasn't enough and there eventually came a need to accommodate at least some Welsh demands.

I forget it's not normal in Europe to be able to do a castle-pub-crawl without ever leaving your local town. There are 19 in my local town. It has 49,000 people living in it.

[Second Dimetrodon Empire]

and tbqh, this whole kerfuffle about urban-rural representation seems like a particularly American vice that has far more to do with the fact that you're probably the last Western democracy left that leaves drawing political boundaries to explicitly partisan processes than any rural bias.

Indeed, We're number one... at staying behind the times.

[San Lumen]

Yes. Death to the urbanite, power to the countryside, etc etc.

We should actually just shift to RCV or Approval Voting

using Australia as a example. Western Australia is 33 percent of the land area but 79 percent is in Perth. Your saying its unfair they have the most representation? In fact in every state and territory except Queensland the capital has the majority of the population with 48 percent in Brisbane.

The majority ought to be shafted out of their fair share of representation?

[Washington Resistance Army]

Approval voting? You’re like the ur-Washingtonian bourgeois reactionary lol, between this and your stances on LGBT politics you could take over from Danny Westneat

I much prefer ranked choice of the two, but I have read some compelling stuff in favor of approval voting. Frankly just about anything would be better than what we have right now though.

Yes. Death to the urbanite, power to the countryside, etc etc.

We should actually just shift to RCV or Approval Voting

using Australia as a example. Western Australia is 33 percent of the land area but 79 percent is in Perth. Your saying its unfair they have the most representation? In fact in every state and territory except Queensland the capital has the majority of the population with 48 percent in Brisbane.

The majority ought to be shafted out of their fair share of representation?

Yes that is exactly what I am saying. I have a burning hatred of Perth specifically. Western Australia is the region of the devil.

[San Lumen]

Approval voting? You’re like the ur-Washingtonian bourgeois reactionary lol, between this and your stances on LGBT politics you could take over from Danny Westneat

I much prefer ranked choice of the two, but I have read some compelling stuff in favor of approval voting. Frankly just about anything would be better than what we have right now though.

using Australia as a example. Western Australia is 33 percent of the land area but 79 percent is in Perth. Your saying its unfair they have the most representation? In fact in every state and territory except Queensland the capital has the majority of the population with 48 percent in Brisbane.

The majority ought to be shafted out of their fair share of representation?

Yes that is exactly what I am saying. I have a burning hatred of Perth specifically. Western Australia is the region of the devil.

How does approval voting solve your issue with representation?

Why do you hate Perth so much and how is it fair to shaft 79 percent of the population and make the rural areas outside the capital count more? In what way is this fair or democratic?

[Senkaku]

Why do you hate Perth so much

Kinda mid, far from everything except South Africa

and how is it fair to shaft 79 percent of the population and make the rural areas outside the capital count more? In what way is this fair or democratic?

It’s more democratic than agrarista convoys moving in and burning the city to the ground, or Perth-oid (?) urban cohorts massacring the rural settlements and recolonizing them with remote-working consultants.