Abstract In this article the voting rules in the Council of the European Union are investigated. It is known that both the current system, according to the Treaty of Nice, and the voting system proposed in the Lisbon Treaty strongly deviate from Penrose's square root law, which under certain assumptions can be shown to be the ideal power distribution. Since it seems easier to make corrections to the current systems than to agree upon completely different new voting rules, one may hope that adjustments of the quota in the Lisbon Treaty might give rise to a system that is close to the square root law. In this article, this question is investigated. The computations it contains show that a mere change of quota in the treaties of Nice and Lisbon cannot bring the system substantially closer to the ideal distribution of power as given by the square root law.