One man, one vote, doesn't work

An IllAdvised Opinion on the underlying legal basis for democracy

The United States went to war with Great Britain with the  slogan, amongst others, ‘no taxation without representation’. This principle, which was rather new in the worldwide scheme of things, was intended to  raise a logical issue in the minds of those who heard it; challenging them to question the idea that, in any sort of parliamentary or representative system, someone could be ruled by someone that they had no business choosing.

Because that was the issue. “Taxation” did not stand for mere ‘taxation’, but all of the business of ruling. And ‘representation’ stood for the entire idea of choosing. “You shouldn’t be ruled,” the longer version might read, “by someone you had no hand in choosing.”

Now there is nothing at all obvious in this statement. Far from being a logical fact of the universe, it is in fact a statement of the very idea of representative government; democracies and republics and the like. It certainly isn’t a principle of government handed down through history. Kings, emperors, dictators… they all were chosen by a variety of systems, but it certainly wasn’t ‘consent of the governed’ let alone being chosen by them.

But assuming that we wish to hold to some form of that principle, what does it mean for the law and legal system? In what ways might a theoretically representative system violate this principle, and thus undermine the very laws it sets out to enforce?

There are dozens or even hundreds of answers to this question. Representative systems have always been rather down on bribery, for example, because in a bribe the person being bribed no longer seeks to ‘represent’ his electorate, but instead the person with the most money. Vote rigging system also break this chain, as do all forms of voter fraud.

 But there is a much more subtle breakdown in this system, one that sometimes even gets installed as a part of the system, proudly, and in the open air. It would be where there is a disconnect between the people being governed and the laws that govern them. Any system where person A can pass a law that affects person B, but not person A. Or, even more subtly, where it affects person B a lot, and person A only mildly.

Let us take the most blatant of these disconnects. Suppose that white people are the majority in an area, and they pass a law that says that black people may not buy houses. This law might have been ‘democratically’ passed. It could be that a majority of voters were in favour of it, and it passed all of the correct hoops for such a law to be passed. It might even be that the constitution, or basic law, of the country allowed for such a law.

Those who favour representative rule would still object, however, because they have another rule which stands in conflict to pure representative law. It is more difficult to state than ‘one man one vote’, and comes out something like ‘the will of the majority, the rights of the minority’. 

But in the end these are contradictory. In the end the will of the majority will determine what the rights of the majority are.

And this does not just happen in big, life altering issues. Where it happens, again and again and again, is in small things. And the biggest small issues aren’t ones of race or class, but of, well, let me give an example.

Let us say that there is some unit of government that covers an area that has one, big, apartment building and a whole bunch of farms. And let us say that there are almost the exact same population…

One day the farm population has a couple more voters. And so they pass some law about… apartments. Let’s say that they decide that every apartment has to have at least six plants in it, growing food, or suffer a six thousand dollar fine.

That might be a good law. Indeed I kind of like it. (Well, I don’t like it as a law, but I do like it as an idea.) But my point here is that the farmers have voted a law that doesn’t affect them, and the apartment dwellers have to live with it.

Now suppose we get more realistic and turn the issue on its head. Suppose it is the apartment dwellers that pass a law that affects the farmers. Probably a lot of people living in those apartments. They might be able to outvote the farmers whenever they please.

Suppose they pass, for example, a land tax. We’ll make this clear, they pass a tax that applies to every square foot of land… nothing to do with value. So the apartment dwellers, who live several stacked on top of each other on almost no land… pay almost no tax. Whereas the farmers, with acres and acres of land, pay a lot.

Do you see the problem? The idea of ‘one man, one vote’ isn’t enough whenever different men have different circumstances wherever different laws can affect different men differently. When the people in cities can make laws that affect the countryside. When a lot of poor people can make a law that only affects rich people. 

This is a basic flaw in democracy: it is contradictory. You can never have ‘one man, one vote’… since every single man represents a different constituency. In the end it is an exercise in futility.