Has there ever been a political system where legislative votes were weighted by how many votes each legislator received? (slrpnk.net)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by frankPodmore@slrpnk.net to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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Let's say you have multi-member constituencies. You hold an election with an outcome that looks roughly like this:

Candidate #1 received 12,000 votes
Candidate #2 received 8,000 votes
Candidate #3 recieved 4,000 votes

All three get elected to the legislature, but Candidate #1's vote on legislation is worth three times Candidate #3's vote, and #3's vote is worth half Candidate #2's vote.

I know that the British Labour Party used to have bloc voting at conference, where trade union reps' votes were counted as every member of their union voting, so, e.g., if the train drivers' union had 100,000 members, their one rep wielded 100,000 votes. That's not quite what I'm describing above, but it's close.

Bonus question: what do you think would be the pros and cons of such a system?

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[-] SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml 21 points 6 months ago

This reminds me of an idea I had for a hybrid between representative and direct democracy where every citizen would be entitled to vote on any bill, but if they didn't have the time/will to do their research, they would be allowed to delegate their vote to one of the political parties. Thus, you would have some votes coming from individuals, and some coming in batches from political parties voting on behalf of individuals.

[-] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 15 points 6 months ago

You're not alone! This concept is called Liquid Democracy

[-] SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml 2 points 6 months ago

Good to see I'm not the only one who had this idea

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this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024

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