Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
It is objectively unfair. The votes of different citizens have very different weights, depending on which states they live in. What you mean is that people who benefit from that differential treatment like it.
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Pure democratic voting would be just as unfair for different reasons. People who wished to escape densely populated areas and live differently would be held to the whims of voters who happened to be in more populated areas.
Pure democratic voting would allow NY and CA to dictate to the rest of the country.
There is no way to make it truly fair. As it is, a farmer in Wyoming holds disproportionate sway over a hipster in Brooklyn. Reversing it so the people who live around the hipster get to control the farmer is guess incrementally better, but you still have one crowd controlling another based on certain characteristics of location. You're effectively just saying that people who choose to be more isolated shouldn't have as much say as those who choose to live together.
Of course you can argue that people in dense areas have the right to vote however they like and just happen to vote in ways very different than people from more isolated areas. But that's not what happens. People in dense areas tend to vote like a monolith because most are similarly situated and all want the same thing. (Sure, Park Avenue has a number of conservative voters, but most of NYC votes blue.) In every dense area you'll get a herding effect, and as a result, policies across the country will reflect the sensibilities of people living in dense areas.
It'd be true to say that this is still preferable because in dense areas people tend to be more tolerant, so the people in more sparsely populated locales won't be precluded from doing what they want. But in terms of economic policy, this is rarely the case. Would Berkeley vote to ban fracking in Pennsylvania if it could? Certainly.
I don't think Presidential elections can ever be fair. But we can get around this by limiting executive power and giving more control to local governments. If the federal laws were pared to allow dense areas to ignore the national policy edicts pushed by people in less populated areas, and vice versa, there could be detente.
The problem with this, as I see it, is the feds and states. The feds want to control the states with purse strings, and the states in turn use the same control on the locals. We need to give locals more power to ignore the states and the feds. Because, let's face it -- we're not a union. We are very different people based on geography and location, and we ought to be able to live as we want within our local communities and not be compelled to act otherwise by the feds or the states except in extreme circumstances.
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