>"Seat allocation" doesn't favor rural districts,
Yes it does, at least in the sense that "rural" means "low population density" or "low ratio of population to Congressional seats".
>[T]he Senate may be the least democratic legislative chamber in any developed nation.
>In the last few years, 41 senators representing as little as a third of the nation’s population have frequently blocked legislation, as the filibuster (or the threat of it) has become a routine part of Senate business.
>In this country, the ratio between Wyoming’s representation and California’s is 66 to 1.
This means that if you are a software or computer engineer living in California, as is the norm here on Hacker News, you have 1/66 the Senatorial voting power as anyone at all who happens to live in Wyoming.
>This pattern has policy consequences, notably ones concerning the environment. “Nations with malapportioned political systems have lower gasoline taxes (and lower pump prices) than nations with more equitable representation of urban constituencies,” two political scientists, J. Lawrence Broz and Daniel Maliniak, wrote in a recent study. Such countries also took longer to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, if they ratified it at all. These differences were, they wrote, a consequence of the fact that “rural voters in industrialized countries rely more heavily on fossil fuels than urban voters.”
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/03/11/us/politics/de...
Emphases mine. But please, explain to me why the voting majority should be consistently denied implementation of their ideas just to cater to people who happen to live where there aren't many other people? That's before we consider the influence of money on elections.