The United States is supposed to be a democracy but is it really? If we live in a country where some citizens' votes count more than others - in other words, in which "one person, one vote" is really not the standard - how can we claim to be a real democratic state? At best we have a limited and imperfect democracy.
It seems that having been set up as a "republic" we have just the sort of government that does not work on the one-person one-vote principle. A recent article in ScienceDaily ("Not all Citizens' Votes Created Equal, and Study Says It Shows in Funding" 5-28-11) points out that many democracies have been set up to water down the power of the vote, denying the idea of equal distribution of voting rights based on the one-person one-vote formula.
Here is just one example: California has 66 times the number of people as Wyoming yet they both have two U.S. senators. Considering the power of the Senate, how is it democracy when states with little populations can block the will of the people in states with large populations? In fact, the Senate was deliberately created to block the popular will (originally the people did not even get to vote for their senators).
ScienceDaily reports that these disproportions become really important when it comes to the distribution of money (and goods and services).
The study looked at long-term (decades) trends in nine different federal-type republics, including the U.S., along with Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Mexico, Spain and Switzerland.
keep reading on:
http://peoplesworld.org/are-republics-democratic/