Wouldn’t it be cool if in the US Congress, each member’s vote counted the fraction of the last-census population of the State they represented? The purpose of this would be to fix the rampantly undemocratic nature of the body. It would be a relatively small effect in the House, but it would huge in both the Senate and the Electoral College.
It’s frustrating that this hasn’t always been the case, given that the one essential tool—the decennial census—has been available since 1790. The amendment to implement it could probably be written in a few sentences. (But see below regarding “a serious obstacle” that makes it practically impossible that such an amendment could ever be accepted.)
The effect would be that including abstentions and absences, the sum total of every vote in those three bodies would match the entire population of the US in the last official census. In the last census, there were 308,156,338 people in the 50 States, so that would be the total on every vote in the Senate and the House. Representatives would vote the actual population at the last census of their district. Senators would vote half their State’s total population. Electoral college members would vote 1/x of their State or District’s population, where x is the number of electors from that State or District (the total in this case would include Washington DC’s population, so currently 308,758,105).
Rules are generally expressed as fractions. A simple majority would be any vote greater than half of the relevant total available votes (either the population of the 50 States for House and Senate or that plus the population of DC for the EC). A two-thirds vote would be scaled to the total population, as would a three-fifths.
The main reason for not wanting this, beyond the desire to continue abusing the current system for partisan advantage, is that the United States was conceived of as a union of free States, and that was a big deal for the Founders. Therefore, they wanted the States, not the People, to be a primary locus of democratic decision making, which is why each State has the same number of Senators, and why the EC includes that principle as part of its structure. However, I believe that this view of America is completely obsolete (and has been since the Civil War). Our national identities are immensely more important to us than our state identities (if we even have state identities any more). For most people, the state identity is limited to observing a few local traditions plus a dollop of red state/blue state partisan identity.*
A serious obstacle to implementing this system for the Senate is obviously Article V of the Constitution which includes the following limit on amending the Constitution: “no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate”. Note however that Article V would not apply either to the House or more importantly to the Electoral College, so at least this approach could fix the EC as a normal amendment. Because of this limitation, however, the wording of the amendment would have to include language such that its application to the Senate would come into force only once every State had consented to it by ratifying the amendment, making the eventual passage of anything like this extremely unlikely.
An interesting corollary of this proposal is that the process for amending the Constitution itself might be included in its scope of the amendment: as each State ratified an amendment (or voted for it in a convention), that ratification (or vote) would also be weighted according to that State’s last-census population. In other words, a constitutional amendment would require indirect (via State legislatures) ratification by three-fourths of the population of the United States rather than by three-fourths of the evenly-weighted State legislatures.
*In fact, if I had my druthers, I’d ditch the States completely except as historical curiosities with no policy weight at all. But that goes way beyond the scope of this diary.
