Is a democracy legitimate if votes don't weigh the same?

[eniwetok]

35. voter suppression is different from...

Voter suppression is a different issue. So what if there was 100% voter participation and 100% vote count accuracy... should the first 1000 citizens get 60% of the seats in a legislature while the second 1000 only gets 40%? This is what happens in the US Senate, only 18% of the population gets 52% of the seats... and the Senate has special powers the House can't veto.

We're brought up to believe this all works out because of the House. But that's only if we think in terms of how states are represented. If we look at how any given citizen is represented... we see it doesn't work out at all. So any citizen in WY has 70x greater influence in the Senate than any citizen in CA. But any citizen in CA does NOT vote for their entire state delegation in the House. So any citizen in CA really gets shafted in the representation department. Such vote weighting/dilution scheme were ruled illegal within states by the Supreme Court in Reynolds v Sims. http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=377&invol=533 It best makes the moral case for civic equality in the vote.

Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests. As long as ours is a representative form of government, and our legislatures are those instruments of government elected directly by and directly representative of the people, the right to elect legislators in a free and unimpaired fashion is a bedrock of our political system. It could hardly be gainsaid that a constitutional claim had been asserted by an allegation that certain otherwise qualified voters had been entirely prohibited from voting for members of their state legislature. And, if a State should provide that the votes of citizens in one part of the State should be given two times, or five times, or 10 times the weight of votes of citizens in another part of the State, it could hardly be contended that the right to vote of those residing in the disfavored areas had not been effectively diluted. It would appear extraordinary to suggest that a State could be constitutionally permitted to enact a law providing that certain of the State's voters could vote two, five, or 10 times for their legislative representatives, while voters living elsewhere could vote only once. And it is inconceivable that a state law to the effect that, in counting votes for legislators, the votes of citizens in one part of the State would be multiplied by two, five, or 10, while the votes of persons in another area would be counted only at face value, could be constitutionally sustainable. Of course, the effect of [377 U.S. 533, 563] state legislative districting schemes which give the same number of representatives to unequal numbers of constituents is identical. 40 Overweighting and overvaluation of the votes of those living here has the certain effect of dilution and undervaluation of the votes of those living there. The resulting discrimination against those individual voters living in disfavored areas is easily demonstrable mathematically. Their right to vote is simply not the same right to vote as that of those living in a favored part of the State. Two, five, or 10 of them must vote before the effect of their voting is equivalent to that of their favored neighbor. Weighting the votes of citizens differently, by any method or means, merely because of where they happen to reside, hardly seems justifiable.