OT: Brazilian Launch Facility

[Loser]

Nice one Geo. I'm passing that around like and AOLer with a survey.

[Andrés]

I didn't know how your electoral system works.
Let's see if I get this right.
Electors are proportional to the number of congressmen of each state, who are proportional to the population of each state.
This systems prevent a small state with a high voters ratio to disbalance the election. (Note that in other countries like my own, mandatory vote is suposed to prevent tis disbalance. But that has its own pros and cons.)
Wouldn't it be possible to weight votes in a similar way with a simple mathematical formula without the need of electors in the middle?

[Loser]

Originally posted by Andres:
Wouldn't it be possible to weight votes in a similar way with a simple mathematical formula without the need of electors in the middle?

Well, that wasn't quite the original intention it was something of a compromise, it's just cool that it worked out that way.

[Jack Simth]

Originally posted by Andres:
I didn't know how your electoral system works.
Let's see if I get this right.
Electors are proportional to the number of congressmen of each state, who are proportional to the population of each state.

Almost right - Electors from a given state = congressman + senetors from that state. Congressmen are proportional to the population, senators are an arbitrary 2 per state; this is why the smallest states still have three electors.

Originally posted by Andres:

This systems prevent a small state with a high voters ratio to disbalance the election. (Note that in other countries like my own, mandatory vote is suposed to prevent tis disbalance. But that has its own pros and cons.)
Wouldn't it be possible to weight votes in a similar way with a simple mathematical formula without the need of electors in the middle?

Possibly, but then you are trying to replace a portion of United States Constitution with something designed to have exactly the same effect as the replaced portion, just to get rid of a few hundred people. Personally, I suspect that minimizing changes to the Constitution to help increase the respect for the document and its intentions are more important than the money wasted on salaries for those few hundred middlemen.

[Wardad]

The two Senate per state and the resulting +2 electoral votes are more than just a legacy from the States Rule era.
They allow better representation of rural agricultural areas. Otherwise important pursuits like growing food may get ignored and trampled on by the voter demands from heavily populated cities.

[Loser]

Originally posted by Jack Simth:
Electors from a given state = congressman + senetors from that state.

That would be Representitives. Both Senators and Representitives are Congressmen.

[Jack Simth]

Originally posted by Loser:
That would be Representitives. Both Senators and Representitives are Congressmen.

Ach, you're right. Ah well, at least I got the numbers right; I missed the term. Oops.