Some votes are worth more than others

[Gunnar Larsson]

It seems to be fairly common that the number of votes required to elect one MP (or something equivalent) can vary widely depending on where the voter lives. This is the case even when the body is supposed to (more or less) represent people (such as the House of Representatives) rather than states (such as the Senate).

Some examples:

Spain: "Some of Sunday’s results can be explained by Spain’s electoral system, which gives more weight to votes from rural areas than urban ones. In Madrid, for example, where Podemos and Ciudadanos enjoy high levels of support, a candidate needs more than 128,000 votes to be elected, while in rural areas where the PP and Socialists traditionally dominate, a candidate could need as little as 38,685 votes, such as the province of Soria in Castilla y León.". So a ratio of 3.3 between the most important and the least important votes.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2015/dec/20/spain-election-results-live-updates-podemos-ciudadanos

EU: "For example, 77,000 German speaking Belgians have one representative, while Greater London have one seat for every 980,000 people." A ratio of 12.7(!) between the most and least important votes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Parliament_constituency

US: In the last presidential election there were 310,000 voters per elector in Ohio, whilst only 83,000 in Wyoming. A ratio of 3.7 between the most and least important votes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2012

Any more examples? It would be interesting to compare between different countries etc. 

[DavidB.]

The US Senate is, of course, an even more extreme example.

[Gunnar Larsson]

The US Senate is, of course, an even more extreme example.

True, but it is meant to represent states rather than people, as per US federalism.

[DC Al Fine]

In the most recent Canadian election some ontario ridings had roughly 130k people, while some Northern/Prince Edward Island ridings had less than 40k. It was worse in the last election where one suburban Toronto riding has 220k people

[Clyde1998]

UK Parliament has the Eilean Siar seat with around 19,000 voters, while the Isle of Wight has 110,000 voters.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

Yes, it's why I think this faux-PR of largish constituencies is a bad idea - they systematically over represent people.  If you really want local representation in your PR system, use MMP or something.

Of course, sometimes geography is your enemy. You don't ideally want MP's representing areas twice as large as the rest of the country, so sometimes a bit of carving is necessary. Likewise with Island communities, who have different needs from salamanders so often need their own MP, even if the constituency is the wrong size.

[ObserverIE]

Likewise with Island communities, who have different needs from salamanders so often need their own MP, even if the constituency is the wrong size.

I see you're working your liberal magic already. Were these salamanders previously Slovenian No-voters?

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

wtf autocorrect. Mainlanders lmao

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

We can use the ratios of the most populous electoral district to the least populous to establish how malapportioned electoral districts are. For example, when the Supremes struck down the hilariously skewed state upper houses in the states they find ratios of up to 1081:1. You can also find the standard deviations or (with a bit of effort) the smallest possible number of votes needed to win a majority.

Some people justify the increased rural representation by saying that urban areas tend to dominate anyway, and so rural interests deserve a bigger slice of the election pie. That was the justification in Queensland and South Australia (Australian capitals being very big proportions of their states' populations typically, while rural areas tend to be gargantuan stretches of relative emptiness). I tend to disagree, aside from really odd cases. (for example, I think Overseas Territories should get their own MP's even though they would be undersized). Worth noting here that the apartheid government was first elected off a malapportioned map.

Even when top-up seats should end silliness, urbans tend to get underrepresented like they do in Iceland, Japan and Norway (I can't think of any converse system where urban voters get more representation than rurals). NZ even had it officially written into their electoral system (the country quota) that urban seats should be 33% more populated than rural ones until 1945.

Of course, we in Britain (as one of the oldest and most demented democracies) take the cake in historic ill-designed maps. Before the Reform Act, Old Sarum (7 voters) and Dunwich (a town that had fallen into the sea) together had twice the representation as the entirety of Manchester. Leading to hilarious stuff like this (my favourite by-election in British history):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatton_by-election,_1803

[YL]

Of course, we in Britain (as one of the oldest and most demented democracies) take the cake in historic ill-designed maps. Before the Reform Act, Old Sarum (7 voters) and Dunwich (a town that had fallen into the sea) together had twice the representation as the entirety of Manchester. Leading to hilarious stuff like this (my favourite by-election in British history):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatton_by-election,_1803

Manchester didn't have any representation of its own at all.  If you lived there, you only got a vote if you qualified for the Lancashire county franchise, and then you shared two MPs (the same number, of course, that Old Sarum and Dunwich each had on their own) with the whole of the rest of the county.

[Tender Branson]

In Austria, it ranges from 37.700 inhabitants/seat in election district 2D (=Carinthia-East) to 63.500 inhabitants/seat in election district 7A (=Innsbruck City).

Of course many of the upper-tier election districts such as Innsbruck have a high non-citizen percentage, which means if we include only eligible voters, their number would drop down to about 50.000/seat.

In general, the votes in Austrian election districts are then about equally worth and evenly distributed.

Besides, it doesn't matter anyway in a party list system - where no MP actually really represents an "electoral district", which is only a technical thing to distribute seats via D'Hondt.