Rosio Pavoris a blog

At least if you live in Estonia, when it comes to the European elections. Here’s how many people an MEP represents, broken down by country:

“Voters” is anyone over the age of 18, actual votes is how many of those people actually used the right their forebears died for in the 2004 elections. Click the image for a bigger, more legible version.

The smaller a bar is, the more power the individual voter has. Small countries are disproportionately represented for reasons that could conceivably be defensible (the countries are ordered by population, with Germany being the biggest and Malta the smallest), and obviously in countries with a really shitty turnout, your vote matters a lot more too.
Countries in both of these categories shit all over democracy: each of the six Estonian MEPs represents just 39,080 votes, whereas each of Belgium’s 24 MEPs represents 285,750, over seven times as many.

I’m not really advocating any change by posting this, I was just bored and thought it was interesting. Ideally all of those green and blue bars would be the same height and the corresponding bars across countries probably would be too, but a discussion can be had, at least on that second one.

By the way, Belgium’s high turnout isn’t a typo; it’s the result of the fact that the European elections are held on the same day as the regional elections, and our regional (and federal) elections are compulsory. I don’t doubt that if they were separated, or if our own elections stopped being compulsory, our turnout would drop considerably too.

At least we’d still beat the Americans.