单选题   Para. 1 ①Every system for converting votes into power has its flaws. ②Britain suffers from an over-mighty executive; Italy from chronically weak government; Israel from small, domineering factions. ③America, however, is plagued by the only democratic vice more troubling than the tyranny of the majority: tyranny of the minority.
    Para. 2 ①This has come about because of a growing division between rural and urban voters. ②The electoral system the Founders devised, and which their successors elaborated, gives rural voters more clout than urban ones. ③When the parties stood for both city and country that bias affected them both. ④But the Republican Party has become disproportionately rural and the Democratic Party disproportionately urban. ⑤That means a red vote is worth more than a blue one.
    Para. 3 ①The consequences are dramatic. ②Republicans hold both the houses of Congress and the White House. ③But in previous elections their candidates got just 46% of the two-party vote for the Senate, and they won the presidential vote last year with 49%.
    Para. 4 Our voting model predicts that, for Democrats to have a better than 50% chance of winning control of the House in November's mid-term elections, they will need to win the popular vote by around seven percentage points.
    Para. 5 ①This imbalance is partly by design. ②The greatest and the smallest states each have two senators, in order that Congress should represent territory as well as people. ③Yet the over-representation of rural America was not supposed to affect the House and the presidency.
    Para. 6 ①For most of the past 200 years, when rural, urban and suburban interests were scattered between the parties, it did not. ②Today, however, the 13 states where people live closest together have 121 Democratic House members and 73 Republican ones, whereas the rest have 163 Republicans and just 72 Democrats.
    Para. 7 ①America has one party built on territory and another built on people. ②The bias is deepening. ③Every president who took office in the 20th century did so having won the popular vote. ④In two of the five elections for 21st century presidents, the minority won the electoral college. ⑤By having elected politicians appoint federal judges, the American system embeds this rural bias in the courts as well.
    Para. 8 ①Americans often say such partisanship is bad for their country. ②The Founding Fathers would have agreed. ③George Washington warned that 'the alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge... is itself a frightful despotism'.
    Para. 9 ①As a component of partisanship, the built-in bias is obviously bad for Democrats. ②But in the long run it is bad for America as a whole, including Republicans. ③When lawmaking is paralyzed, important work is too hard. ④The few big laws that are approved pass on party-line votes. ⑤That emboldens the opposition to reverse or neuter them when they take power.
    Para. 10 ①Bitter partisanship and electoral bias poison politics and are hard to fix. ②Changing the constitution is hard—and rightly so. ③Voting reform is not the whole answer to partisanship and built-in bias, but it would help. ④It is hard, but not outlandish. ⑤To maintain the trust of all Americans, the world's oldest constitutional democracy needs to reform itself.