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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[-] Reddfugee42@lemmy.world 9 points 6 months ago

That's SUPPOSED to be how the US Congress works, not by weighing votes, but by apportioning congresspeople by population, the votes of each Congressperson being equal, but larger populations getting more Congresspersons.

"This region of (n) people elected Bob. The neighboring region of (2n) people is apportioned into two subdistricts, and they have chosen Bill and Ted as their Congresspersons."

HOWEVER, the number of voting seats in the House of Representatives has been capped at 435 since 1913, by the Reapportionment Act of 1929.

At that time, the US population was 97m, meaning that each congressperson represented 223,000 people. Based on population growth, we would need nearly 1500 Congresspersons just to have the same granularity of representation that we had in 1913.

this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024

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