Diluted Voting Power

Here's a thought: the more voters there are for a given "Parliament" the less powerful each vote is.

According to the UK census of 1951 there were about 50 million citizens. By mid 2010 it was about 62 million. It's expected to reach 70 million by 2027. Assuming, for the sake of simplicity, that the proportion of the population eligible to vote remains the same, in 2010 your vote was worth about 20% less than in 1951 and by 2027 it will have lost another 9%. But, of course, the proportion of the total population who can vote will be much larger in the future, due to the aging population.

OK, this is a simplistic idea. But now consider the effect of giving powers to a federal European government. Now your vote is merely one in a little less than 500 million.

Our increasing powerlessness is the very opposite of the involved and empowered voters I argue for in this blog.

This post was inspired by Prof. Al Bartlett's lecture "Arithmetic, Population and Energy", available on YouTube. Here's the first part of the series: