Imagine that you have a nation that is one thousand square miles in size. Ninety percent of the nation is taken up by a city of ten million people. The other ten percent is empty desert and wilderness, populated only by a grizzled hermit named Jim. Tasked with inventing a representative political system for this country, you say, “Well, looks like there are two areas here, so I’ll draw a line between the city and Jim’s land, and I’ll give each an equal number of representatives. When the ten million city people want something they will have to negotiate with Jim, who has a power equal to all of them combined.”
Stupid, right? Yes. This is the United States Senate. This is quite literally the design of the U.S. Senate…
could you do something weird like take the state with the least population, and set that as a floor for every other state? alaska gets 1, california gets round(population/alaska population) ?
This is generally called the “Wyoming Rule”, because since 1990 it’s been the least populous state.
https://gigafact.org/fact-briefs/was-nevada-the-least-populous-state-until-1960/
I’m almost positive CGP Grey did something along these lines, with spreadsheets and everything, but I cannot for the life of me find the video.
There was a multipart series on voting.
Is it one of those?
Possibly, though it would’ve been one of the newer ones.