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?
But then those same rural politicians will then make the opposite argument against other minority populations (such as people whom are LGBT or among race lines) and that we shouldn't let a small minority control our state or that who cares what they think. They switch rapidly from 'tyranny of the majority is bad' to 'tyranny of the minority is bad'.
I caution people not to let politicians become their mental picture of the constituency.
Nobody is right or wrong, they just all have different priorities. Regardless of those priorities, the resources must be allocated to ensure the entire ecosystem can continue to survive. The only solutions to accomplish that are going to be compromises. But unfortunately, the groups in the population centers have managed for an incredibly long time to avoid compromise. So, now California finds itself in an unenviable position of battling drought and fire nonstop.
That is tyranny of the majority.
Because, as parent said, the majority will usually benefit themselves even if it means harming the minority. If I belonged to some 51% group, why would I not vote to double my wealth, even if it meant stealing from the other 49%? And before you say 'I would never vote for that', it's never worded that way, but more subtle policies that would achieve the same thing.
Which then goes back to the person you responded to: That the majority and the minority can both make wrong policy decisions.
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.
We have a state with 100,000 square miles and only 600,000 residents. We have another state that has a little more space but has 40 million residents. Their circumstances are so vastly different that the policies of one would be very unlikely to work well for the other.
> 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.
America uses first past the post. It isn't great, there are many better systems later developed. If we were to improve our voting and party system it would benefit the entire country massively.
In fact, we see that scenario happening right now here in Texas where cities are not allowed govern. See also: Georgia.
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.