In the US, we have a wonderful election system set up. Since we are a decently large country with many diverse types of communities, there are MANY different needs that must be addressed when a politician is running. If you go by % of population you’re not getting the WHOLE picture.

To break this down, imagine you live in a small state with 25 or so counties. The state itself has a fairly low population, but it does have 2 HUGE cities that contain 1/2 of the states population. In an election system in which it goes on what the highest percentage voted for, you’re going to allow politicians to ONLY care about the Big city and how they can get them to vote one way or another. This means that little to none of the needs or wants of the ENTIRE REST OF THE STATE are going to be regarded. However! If each county gets a number of votes based on population, this means that at least some of the needs of the WHOLE state must be addressed, otherwise a politician would have no chance.

Now let’s look at some basic math in this. We’re going to assume that each county gets 1 vote for every thousand people just for the sake of ease, that by some odd miracle each non- big city county has 1000 people only, and that both big cities are in SEPERATE counties (increasing their chances of winning) and have 8x the population of the other counties. There are precisely 25 counties.

That means even IF both counties the big cities end up voting 100% for the big city candidate who only lobbied for big city issues, they would have 16 votes for that candidate. EVEN IF they swing one of the smaller counties to vote for theirs as well, that still means that even if they swung 3 of the smaller counties to vote with them, the smaller counties candidate would win.