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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe senators who opposed DeVos represent 36 million more people than those who supported her.
https://thinkprogress.org/the-senators-who-opposed-devos-represent-36-million-more-people-than-her-supporters-do-4705655a2bc7#.h7nf3kw1l....."The 50 senators who opposed DeVos represent 179,381,386 people, while the 50 senators who supported her represent only 143,064,962 individuals.
ThinkProgress calculated these numbers using 2016 population estimates from the U.S. Census. In states where both senators supported DeVos, we allocated the entire states population to the FOR column. Likewise, in states where both senators opposed her, we allocated their states entire population to the AGAINST column. In states where the two senators split their votes, we allocated half of the states population to FOR and half to AGAINST.
You can check our work here.
The most populous state in the union is California, with 39,250,017 residents. The least populous is Wyoming, with 585,501. That means that a voter in Wyoming has more than 67 times as much representation in the Senate as a voter in California.
And thats how we got an Education secretary who doesnt know very basic things about education."
pangaia
(24,324 posts)madville
(7,412 posts)It will be a long time (not in any of our lifetimes) before you find enough states willing to give up a Senator to even things out. Roughly 30 states would have to give up one of their Senators and see that vote given to large states like California, Texas, Florida and New York.
The entire point of the Senate is that the states have equal power and representation regardless of population.
Skittles
(153,226 posts)maybe it served a purpose back in the day but now with instant communication - no, it's fucking BULLSHIT and it's giving us GARBAGE like DEVOS
madville
(7,412 posts)with equal representation. The fix is to change the Constitution or expel some states, neither of which is likely to happen.
Each state has equal standing in the Senate, it's the way it will always be.
Mariana
(14,861 posts)when you remember that originally, Senators were not required to be elected by the people. They were mostly supposed to represent the interests of their state's government.
Stinky The Clown
(67,832 posts)smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)I don't know how much more of this I can take. I don't know how much more of this our country can take.
TheFrenchRazor
(2,116 posts)Cha
(297,810 posts)mnhtnbb
(31,408 posts)true democratic values, i.e., one person one vote representation.
That's one of the reasons I am feeling so hopeless about the future of the country.
The number of electors in the Electoral College is determined based upon the number of senators and representatives for a state, which
is how it gets so biased right from the start.
We are well and truly fu*ked for more than a generation, I believe. And since I'm 66, I am not expecting to see this nightmare
that has come to be as a result of the last election end before my life runs out--unless there is a real revolution.
I mean in the streets, seizing power, all out civil war.
jmg257
(11,996 posts)Represented the States' interest, not the peoples'.
Thats what the House of Reps is for.
muriel_volestrangler
(101,390 posts)for representative bodies with uneven constituencies.
A precondition for the appropriateness of the method is en bloc voting of the delegations in the decision-making body: a delegation cannot split its votes; rather, each delegation has just a single vote to which weights are applied proportional to the square root of the population they represent. Another precondition is that the opinions of the people represented are statistically independent. The representativity of each delegation results from statistical fluctuations within the country, and then, according to Penrose, "small electorate are likely to obtain more representative governments than large electorates." A mathematical formulation of this idea results in the square root rule.
The Penrose method is not currently being used for any notable decision-making body, but it has been proposed for apportioning representation in a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly,[1][2] and for voting in the Council of the European Union.[3][4] Other bodies where the Penrose method could be appropriate include the US Presidential Electoral College and the Bundesrat of Germany.[citation needed]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_method
Of course, with 2 senators per state, and thus a split vote possible, the Penrose method may not be the mathematically fair way of weighting the votes. But, just to see, I took ThinkProgress's spreadsheet, and gave each senator a vote proportional to the square root of their state population. And the 'against DeVos' vote wins (117,337 to 108,394). I also checked out the overall Senate Republican v. Democratic+Independent balance, and it's Republican 110,409, Dems+Ind 115,322. So by that method, the Senate ought to be Democratic (very narrowly - it would just need a seat from a state the size of Missouri or larger to switch from Dems to Repubs to give Republicans control).