If the United Nations is ever to assume the greater powers needed for effective peace-keeping and peace-making, the General Assembly and/or the Security Council will need an improved system of representation and voting. The present system of giving each country one vote in the General Assembly, regardless of the country's size, and of giving a veto in the Security Council to five big powers, is unrealistic and imperfect for many reasons, which need not be detailed here.
Weighted voting at the UN has been suggested for various reasons: (1) to overcome the problems of the mini-states now being admitted, with one vote just as the very large states have; (2) to prevent voting in the General Assembly from swinging any further in the anti-West, anti-Israel direction; (3) to satisfy the requirements of democratic justice: i.e., “one person-one vote,” not “one nation-one vote”; and, (4) to reflect more realistically the distribution of power among nations.
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