2006-09-29 08:24![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
digitaldiscipline
digitaldisciplineI've ranted in the past about my pipe dream of a weighted vote [originally germinated in my mind by Lou Tafler's book Fair New World, published by Backlash Books], where informed and clueful individuals' votes carry more weight than their ignorant compatriots', and this is rather quickly dismissed as unfair, unAmerican, or just a big fat pain in the ass to administer.
But, with election season upon us, and reminded by an article in Salon.com yesterday... if you want your vote to count, you need to live somewhere with a disproportionate weight per voter as calculated thusly: divide Electoral College votes by state population. (Note: This is not computed for registered voters, simply gross population.)
An individual's vote counts least in Texas (0.0000014873 ECV/person); it counts most in Wyoming (0.0000058905)... that's right, Cheney's vote on November 7th counts about four times more than GWB's, unless they both vote as DC residents (0.0000054494, 2nd "heaviest" of the lot).
Now, call me an egalitarian asshole, but I think that the EC needs to be abolished out of hand, or at the very least, be weighted evenly for all citizens to provide truly equal participation in the election process, even before we get into other sensible ideas, like distributing EC votes proportional to the popular vote breakdown in that state.
Anyone else feeling vaguely less-enfranchised this morning?
[Population & ECV statistics come from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_population, if anyone else wants to replicate my spreadsheet.]
But, with election season upon us, and reminded by an article in Salon.com yesterday... if you want your vote to count, you need to live somewhere with a disproportionate weight per voter as calculated thusly: divide Electoral College votes by state population. (Note: This is not computed for registered voters, simply gross population.)
An individual's vote counts least in Texas (0.0000014873 ECV/person); it counts most in Wyoming (0.0000058905)... that's right, Cheney's vote on November 7th counts about four times more than GWB's, unless they both vote as DC residents (0.0000054494, 2nd "heaviest" of the lot).
Now, call me an egalitarian asshole, but I think that the EC needs to be abolished out of hand, or at the very least, be weighted evenly for all citizens to provide truly equal participation in the election process, even before we get into other sensible ideas, like distributing EC votes proportional to the popular vote breakdown in that state.
Anyone else feeling vaguely less-enfranchised this morning?
[Population & ECV statistics come from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_population, if anyone else wants to replicate my spreadsheet.]
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