The Electoral College was not formed to give small states more power. It was created to give slave states more power. You see, at the time of the constitutional convention only adult males could vote -- but the South's adult males were 30 percent or more enslaved. This would have meant the slaveholders would have been outvoted in the choice for President, so they insisted on the Electoral College. Madison, IIRC, later said it was the worst decision he ever made.
You're conflating the Electoral College with the 'Three Fifths' Compromise.
The 'Three Fifths' Compromise counted 60% of a state's population of slaves and "Indians not taxed" towards its House[/i] representation (and, consequently, its number of electoral votes). This had the effect of dramatically inflating the House delegations from states with a lot of slaves.
The Electoral College if anything
diluted the power of the plantation-dominated slave states.
At the time, there were five of them: Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, and Maryland. There were other states with considerable numbers of slaves, but none where the slaves made up such a large percentage of the overall population that adding three fifths of them would be likely to grant them an extra seat in the House, and certainly not more than one such seat.
So the way the Electoral College combines Senate and House votes to get the number of electors was effectively a +10 bonus to the number of electoral votes a president could receive from plantation states, and a +16 bonus to the number they could receive from staes not dominated by plantation slavery.
A nationwide popular vote of free citizens only would have been
worse for the slave states than the Electoral College, but the real issue was the Three Fifths Compromise; the Electoral College did little or nothing to make it worse.
Because their used to amazing popularity? Between the long years of unusually high election percentages, the post recontact tour, the victory rush after the year 32 success, their current vast majority approval in the assembly, the gratitude and loyalty of the Lystheni following the deal with the Salarian union, Mira and her advisors are particularly used to me playing triumphant hero, and engaging in mistrust towards political parties and their backers.
I think this is too quick to dismiss the in-character expertise of Marae and to a lesser extent Tamara. "Oh, they're so used to being amazingly popular and deeply suspicious of all rival power groups that they don't even
notice when someone has reason to view them as a rival." I don't buy it.
Though that may be influenced by what Poptart says a few posts after this, noting that historically this
has been an issue where the dalatrasses have cooperated with Mira before, such that the sudden cessation of cooperation is at least unusual. Valid reasons for political enmity may of course play a role, but I think there's at least one major element to this situation that Mira doesn't
know about, as opposed to something she knows about and is simply ignoring because she's "used to amazing popularity."
The one issue is, with the exception of our volus colony, we have several, growing colonies approach self sufficiency they could easily be trying to secure positions leading instead, especially with the expectation of democratic reforms in the near future.
Getting a colony strong enough to be a serious, relevant rival to Mira's power on Virmire would be a century-long or longer project. As in, something like 8-12 salarian generations. That's not an alternative to domestic political maneuver for salarian leaders who are alive
now.
I'd disagree with that sentiment to an extent. Especially here. You have to give small worlds some ability to have an actual say in the policies that effect them or the few highly populated worlds can just run total roughshod over them.
1) I respect the principle, but in this setting planetary populations can easily differ by a factor of a thousand or more. You have to be careful to avoid the opposite situation, where two tiny colony planets can outvote a single enormous population that has the misfortune to exist on only
one planet.
2) Remember that "populous" and "low-population" aren't permanent conditions built into the nature of all planets. Virmire is a garden world that's been colonized for at least a few hundred years at this point. It has a population of something like seven billion. But there are other garden worlds in the Sentry Omega cluster alone, and probably at least ten or more garden worlds in all the clusters we now control or plan to soon reconquer from the rachni. Many of those worlds could easily support populations of a billion or more, maybe even larger than Virmire's population, at some future time. A system that gives tiny, easily marginalized colony worlds representation
now could become unmanageable at some future date when the Commonwealth has a population converging on 100 billion scattered across dozens of planets.
I can see it devolving into something like the situation in Star Wars just before the Clone Wars kick off. The Core Worlds monopolizing power for their own benefit while the worlds of the outer rim and some of the mid-rim get shafted and exploited for the benefit of the Core while their problems and concerns are ignored.
This would be a more realistic concern if we didn't have the means to rapidly "stand up" large colonial populations and give them representation. Colony worlds already have representation in the Assembly- the situation isn't as lopsided as, say, the total lack of representation in the House of Commons experienced by colonies of the British Empire. Since the colonial population is already growing as a percentage of the Commonwealth's total, in time, Virmire will no longer be an overwhelming majority and will lose this superpower status naturally.
Large, heavily populated garden worlds will always hold the great majority of political power, but one can reasonably argue that
this is a good thing.
1)Salarians do not work that way. An adult salarian is a sophont who makes their own decisions, not a robot or a rachni drone. Loyaltoes are not transmitted at birth. A salarian mother from the Union who has children raised in Virmire cannot magically raise them to be infiltrators, and she will be dead in roughly three decades anyway.
Nitpick: Salarians actually do tend to imprint on parental figures to some extent... But they're not robots or drones, that is true. However, there are reasons why salarian government structures tend to be kind of feudal- because the underlying mechanism is that if you cloister a baby salarian with a specific salarian adult, they tend to come away with a lifelong psychological loyalty towards that adult.
I see you're still going with this line despite evidence to the contrary. In diplomacy actions where we're reliant on others to agree, bargain and negotiate a settlement, there will be consequences when we fail. We can't just necessarily repear the action unlike options where we're just relying on ourselves to build it like new shipyards, a new intelligence analysis division or researching some ancient ruins.
If you want to go with this action for other reasons by all means do that but this line of argument irks me, especially when you've been proven wrong on your assumption that we can "just repeat it if it fails" in the past.
To be fair, the consulate exchange could fail for a variety of reasons other than "other side refuses."
It's not
certain that we can just retake the action if it fails, but it's at least
plausible. And unfortunately, the problem of "we may not always be able to redo this action" arises in almost every Diplomacy action possible, so at some point we do need to accept at least some risk, or we're never going to be able to spend our Double Downs anywhere else.
