The ultimate problem is that "the rest of the state" (for virtually all states) is empty, hardly anybody lives there, and letting a minority override the will of everybody else is tyranny of the minority.
Taken to the extreme, this is ultimately what killed South Africa and Rhodesia and other countries - a relatively small minority imposing their will on the majority, things getting worse and worse with no recourse for the people whose lives were actually affected until things boiled over.
At its core, this is ultimately an argument for anti-democratic principles.
There is often something lost in this argument, which I think is a strength of the system, not a weakness. That is: the US Senate, which was the compromise, is a rejection of utilitarianism as the pinnacle of governing.
You don’t want tyranny of the minority, and I don’t want tyranny of the majority, so let’s have a system of checks and balances that ensures (within limits) that we address both groups.
Having city dwellers decide what happens in rural areas is the tyranny of imperialism.
You also are performing a convenient geographic sidestep where suddenly "where you live" isn't the country or even the state but is really only concerned with the local. So the rest of the people who live in the nation are diminished.
Localism has led to lots of problems in American history, now we can add a shitshow of a Coronavirus response on top of the others.
The party of localism tends to be gung-ho about that huge federal military operation... yet refuses a necessarily-similar intervention in a pandemic.
That's without skewing the strength of the vote, even!
So, no, I'm far from convinced that we have to protect the poor rural folks from their fellow citizens.
Your argument is equally valid in reverse -- there's no reason why rural dwellers should decide what happens in cities. Why should your vote count for more because I have more neighbors than you do?
And if these people don't get extra votes, it's "the tyranny of imperialism"?
Let's pick a state - Kansas, nice and rectangle. Let's say it was empty, and 10 farmers moved in and divided it 10 ways. They are happy to themselves on their huge plots of land, doing their own thing.
One farmer needs extra cash, so sells off a dozen acres. That dozen acres puts in a neighborhood of 20 houses. Now that 20 houses controls the entire state, effectively. They decide people shouldn't be able to own so much land, and owning more than 10 acres is illegal.
Sure it's contrived, but you start to notice how it's not as simple as 'majority rules is best.'
Why should that single farmer be allowed to control the entire state over the rest of the 1000 people?
Moreover, why does people's location on a 2d grid matter at all for grouping people under representatives? Why not the first letter of their surname? Their age? Maybe the altitude of their home? Seems just as arbitrary.
This is a rather short-sighted position. There's a reason the tyranny of the majority was avoided, and it's because the majority will always vote for their own benefit. If they do so, it almost always hurts the 49%.
You have to balance the needs of a state as if it were a living organism. You can't simply optimize everything for the heart when the lungs have needs as well, or the body dies.
I keep hearing people say this, and it baffles me. If the majority of people feel a certain way, who's to say it's not the right way? If you start picking this apart it really just comes down to "yeah but the majority can sometimes be wrong", which, I have news for you, applies to the minority as well.
At the end of the day, representative democracy exists instead of "pure" democracy because there's issues scaling the operation of government into something where everybody votes on everything. So we decide to have 1 representative for every N people. To do this, we need to break people into cohorts somehow, such that each cohort is roughly the same size. There's lots and lots of ways to do this, but we seemed to have settled on geographic locations, and sizing so that they (mostly) have similar numbers of people.
But since populations can be extremely concentrated in some areas, cohorting people by geographic location becomes less and less useful. It seems to me in an ideal world, everyone would be randomly assigned to a cohort via some sort of consistent hash, and they would be evenly distributed. Mind explaining to me why this would be inferior to cohorting on geographic location?
No one ever suggests it because it's obviously ridiculous.
LOOK at the results of America's screwed up voting system! A deranged madman in power, the economy in collapse with no rescue even planned, and a virus growing exponentially with no plan to fight it.
You could just as easily say "old people are trying to pass laws that make lives miserable for young people, we really ought to have fewer representatives for old people", and it would make exactly as much sense as saying the same thing about a geographic location. There are a million different ways you could slice people up into representatives, but we end up settling on geographic location because... reasons, I guess.
In fact, we see that scenario happening right now here in Texas where cities are not allowed govern. See also: Georgia.
I mean... what exactly are you complaining about? The straw ban?
