Weighted Voting
The idea of giving unequal weights to the several voting
members of an assembly is not a new idea; rather it is an old idea that fell
out of fashion. It was practiced by the Romans, in Germany pre-1870, and in Sweden,
until 1918.[1] In Britain, graduates of universities
exercised a privileged extra voice in the House of Commons by a different
mechanism, in that there were extra MPs elected only by graduates (wherever
they might live) in addition to their constituency vote. Thus Oxford and
Cambridge universities elected two members each until 1950. (Other English
universities shared 2 Members between them, as did Scottish universities.)[2] In all these cases the bias of the
voting power of citizens or MPs was towards privileging certain classes at the
expense of other classes. The present conception of democracy requires us to
count each citizen as of the same value as every other, and these preferential
biases have all been abolished.
The suggestion, recently beginning to be discussed, of Proportional
Representation by Weighting Members [3,4]
has the opposite objective. It recognizes that approximately half of the votes
cast in British parliamentary elections are essentially wasted, in that they are
not successful in electing an MP, and are therefore not represented in the
House of Commons. It sees this wastage as contributing to the conclusion that
voting is pointless, a conclusion that will be disastrous to democracy. The
voting preferences (as to Party) of all those wasted votes are all known and it
is a simple matter to take account of those preferences. The mechanism is
discussed elsewhere [3,4].
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