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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 [email protected] to c/[email protected]

36 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

If I live in City X and there is a really tight race between two candidates, and one of them wins by a hair, then you're saying that all of the people in city X now have the person representing them being weaker in the legislature.

I think OP is saying that City X would have Reps 1, 2, and 3 (etc), and that (in your scenario), 1 would have a slightly stronger voting power than 2, while 3 had less power again.

This would mean that almost all voters in the city had some representation that they agree with, but with power apportioned proportionally.

Compared with City Y (same population), where candidate N won 99% of the vote, N would wield more power than 1, 2 or 3 individually, but the same amount of power as 1, 2 and 3 combined. So the city's representations would be equal overall.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

That's exactly right, thank you.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

No worries, it's an interesting idea to think through :-)