[KS] Re: voting rights [was: Koreans in Japan]

[k u s h i b o]

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Dr. John Caruso Jr. wrote:
> Yes, there are problems of equitable representation
> as Wash DC has a pop. of 520,000

I have it listed as 620,000 (Washington DC itself, not including the
surrounding areas of Virginia and Maryland).

> while Wyoming (home of Dick Cheney) has only 480,000
> residents and gets two US Senators and one Congressperson.

And it had even less when it became a state way back. Does anybody know the
population threshold for statehood? Guam has only 105,000 residents, which I
think is below that threshold.

DC does now get representation on par with states of similar population in
terms of presidential elections. It receives three electoral votes, as if it
were a state.

> Voting is historically a privilege not an inalienable
> right and the electoral college further exposes the myth
> of majority rule as you mentioned in Hayes v. Tilden.

The more I think about it, the more detrimental I consider it to be. It
really exacerbates the spoiler effect of a third party candidate, skewing
the results in favor of what may be the least popular candidate, and/or
forcing many voters to choose a major party candidate they prefer less
rather than a third party candidate they feel has no chance.

> Spanish is the language of instruction in Puerto Rico....
> I wonder how many parallels we could draw between the status
> of Puerto Rico and the mainland and Japan and Korea?  Didn't
> we annex PR in 1898 and force the residents to
> become US citizens in 1917?

"Force"? That may be a bit strong of a word, especially if citizenship were
offered as a concession of some kind.

But, yes, definitely some parallels (although the example of the Philippines
may be a closer parallel; Puerto Rico would be more like America's Okinawa,
not America's Korea). At any rate, some parallels may be that there was a
different language spoken, close geographic proximity of the colony to the
colonizer, belated granting of full citizenship, a native separatist
movement that included violence against the high-level members of the
colonizer's government (there was an assassination attempt by Puerto Rican
separatists against Truman in the 1950s), local infrastructure development
that was put in place mainly for the colonizer but had peripheral benefits
for the local population, drafting of the colonized into the military for
battles in foreign lands and waters, and discrimination against the
colonized who migrated to the main territory of the colonizer.

Differences would be that there was no attempt (to my knowledge) to supplant
Spanish with English or to dissuade the use of Spanish, no military had to
be dismantled nor a national government replaced, the proportional
difference between the PR and Mainland US populations was much larger, the
proportional difference between the PR and Mainland land masses was much
larger, the PR shared cultural aspects with other nearby nations so there
wasn't much fear of losing a whole culture, and little administrative
attempt was made to force Americanization on the PRans.

Off-hand, I can't think of any others.

K U S H I B O