From: "Robert J. Chassell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
- Assign votes based on population on a log-type curve, so they don't become so out of proportion.
I don't think this, or any other scaling factor, is possible, for two reasons:
* People on the planet as a whole now favor the `one person, one vote' ideal that democrats have pushed for over a century. This is a very strong meme.
Unfortunately, the US presidential system isn't quite so fair. Wyoming: 3 electoral votes, pop 479602, ev/person = 6.2e-6 California: 55 electoral votes, pop 33145121, ev/person = 1.6e-6
So for the presidential election, a Wyoming voter has nearly 4 times the voting power a California voter does.
A critical issue is how representatives are elected:
* Must potential candidates be passed by a board of guardians, as in Iran? Or many any one qualified to vote run?
* Is an election run like that in many continental European states, in which a voter choses a list? Or does the candidate who gains a plurality of votes win as in many US elections?
(I myself think that half the representatives should be elected via a plurality of votes and half be elected as the top four among a larger group, in an election that melds together four of the single representative districts. The reason is that `at large' representatives often represent minorities better.)
I had been assuming the reps were to be appointed by the government, rather than elected. (That's why I didn't think the bribery factor would be much influenced.) I hadn't realized how big a change you were proposing from the current UN system! (Would the reps in the senate-equivalent and new 3rd chamber also be elected?)
This seems like a fairly radical proposal, in that it would essentially be creating a new foreign-policy-only branch of government that would seem to be fully independent of the President/Congress in setting foreign policy.
I'm also not sure how that would work out, checks-and-balances -wise. It seems like there is potential for the president/congress to decide on one course of action, while the new-UN reps decide to act upon a completely different one. It also seems like it would remove the strong-central-leader role that the presidency now fulfills (insert inevitable GWB sarcasm here :-) ).
You mentioned that the EU parliament does currently something similar. I'm not at all familiar with the EU parliament - how do the EU nations handle these concerns? Or does the EU parliament not have broad enough scope/power for it to be an issue?
My other thought is that even if the representative candidates are chosen from an "approved list", allowing the populace to vote on them might be too much democracy for some nations to tolerate or be willing to participate in. (That, or the elections would just be a sham with the reps all being puppet flunkies of the current government).
I agree that the US wouldn't join an organization it lacks a veto in. I'm not sure how it could ever be confident the organization would not ever undertake actions damaging to the US, given my concerns above about nations acting in self-interest.
The reason to join is because the benefits are seen to outweigh the damages. The original 13 states of the US joined together to produce a Federal system even though they could see dangers to them of joining.
One big benefit that the 13 states had in favor of federalization is that all 13 states largely shared many common interests, plus a common culture, language, and geographic region. Except maybe slavery, which they punted on, at that point, no states really had strong interests diametrically opposed to any other states.
The nations of the world are far, far more disparate than those 13 states, with less common ground and a lot less basis for trust.
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