And mark my words, this will come to bite the EU on the butt eventually, because our system is set up around precisely the same kind of logic.
- Jake 640 kiloton should be enough for anybody
And if the US government elected to use that authority to establish a national electoral roll, and simply made it open to state to use that roll for their state elections if they wished, most states would do so for the budgetary savings.
The problem is political ... for forty years, one political party has had a strategy of suppressing the vote turning out for the other party, and for all except six years years of that period, that party has either held the White House or had a majority in the House or both.
The electoral college itself was is an institution with its original intention destroyed by the rise of political parties. However, nowadays, most newly established democracies go to a directly elected Presidency, with all of the flaws of that institution ... certainly nobody is going to establish a system in which local communities are supposed to elect their best representative to go to the capital and help decide who the President will be.
Remember that the big spread between state populations in the US is because of the drive to gain state status with a fixed population threshold required, with some of those states then filling in far beyond the state founder's wildest dreams and some of those states emptying out. AFAIU, in the original House/Senate compromise between big states and small states, the balance was tilted substantially closer to one person one vote than the EU population weighted voting system. Utsukushikereba sore de ii
And you're probably right that the EU voting weights would make even less sense for a federation than the US' - that's why I'm saying that it'll bite us on the butt one fine day when we wake up and find out that we've evolved into a federation, but still allocate fourteen MEPs to a backwater province like Denmark with barely five million people.
I think we need to plan out - with considerable attention and ahead of time - how to realise when we're transitioning from a confederation to a federation and what steps to take to make the (IMO necessary) transition from weighted majority to one-man-one-vote as smooth and untroubled as possible.
Indeed, if the EU followed the US model, the members to the European Parliament would be distributed on a one-man, one-vote basis to the extent possible with the boundaries of the subsidiary units. Utsukushikereba sore de ii
I'm sure it'd make Montana and Utah scream bloody murder if it were to happen, though :-P
There's no reason why Montana and Utah (or Rhode Island and Delaware) would care much ... "watering down" the clout of their Senate delegation by a notional 2% from expanding the Senate by two members is not going to stand in the way.
If California was to entirely sacrifice the extra political clout of being a big state by split into five or ten states, that would be something to excite substantial political calculus ... dividing from one egregiously oversized state to two big states would not be all that much of a change. Utsukushikereba sore de ii
Dividing into 2 states would still leave it ridiculously under-represented. "The womb that spawned that thing is fertile yet"
And at the same time, average level of representation is not the sole measure of political clout. In a winner take all system, the large states have more influence than an equivalent number of states would do ... if California was divided down into a saner four to eight states, rather than leaving it as the unmanageable, unworkable behemoth that it is, it would lose influence on the Presidential election under the winner take all rule.
So there's another reason to shift to proportional distribution of electoral votes ... to take out that incentive to remain at an unmanageable size. Utsukushikereba sore de ii
