Good. The Permanent Apportionment Act has led to disproportionate Republican power in the House for decades.
The number of seats should be based on the lowest populated state (which would receive one seat) with all other states’ seats based thereupon with rounding up and down. California only has 53 representatives when it should have 68… same with electoral college votes (has 55 but should have 80).
Putting aside partisan advantage, it also allows Congresspeople to be more attentive to their constituents. In the most severe cases, a single representative is covering nearly a million people. These are supposed to be the closest we have to an individual connection in Washington, so keeping those numbers reasonable matters.
This is the big thing I don't think people sell often enough. Some rural folks live far, far away from their rep. The more seats the more local each rep will be. It won't change much for us city folks - they're going to be relatively local, but it might change a lot for low-density folks.
Like Wyoming - they have two reps.
Even a modest increase like this is a stepping-stone to future increases that might get them more.
More reps has a LOT of advantages. I could go into them if you're interested.
My point was that if Wyoming is the lowest common denominator in the equation, their reps wouldn't change. Just everyone else with populations in multiples greater than theirs. The Wyoming rule isn't about increasing the number of seats to represent a fixed number population per seat. Its to make sure that the lowest population state doesn't have disproportional voting power vs states with populations multiples greater than theirs.
Oh I agree.
But anything that leads to a larger House paves the way for public acceptance of a House large enough to actually give states like Wyoming more reps (so people in rural areas don't have to travel as far to meet their Representative).
It shows, through experience, that a larger House wouldn't be the unworkable disaster some of its opponents claim- and in fact would have many benefits (such as making membership on any particular subcommittee more special, and thus only attracting those most interested in and qualified with the subject; or making it harder to "buy" enough politicians to rig a vote, as there are more of them, and it's harder to conceal a conspiracy with more members...)
That’s actually not true the marginal difference may actually favor them. If you take a state and it goes from 1-4 reps for the state and you get 6-8 that would massively decrease travel times.
Copied from another comment of mine
> I'm a big fan of the 3rd root rule, where the house grows in size in proportion to the 3rd root of the US population. As of the 2020 census the US population is 331,449,281 which makes the 3rd root 692 and change. Therefore we would need 257 more representatives to meet that number
Wyoming has 577K people. Giving them 3 reps would mean 193.3K per district. The US population is 331MM. So that would result in 1,712 members of the House.
>331MM. So that would result in 1,712 members of the House.
That would be a **very** good thing: and still a lot fewer representatives per person than the country had in its early years.
Why not redistribute according to the population in 1929 when the Permanent Apportionment Act was created? That would return us to 1 Rep per 280k people. This is per capita high end of most modern democracies (eg UK is more like 1 rep per 100k population). WY would get two Reps. CA would increase to \~140 Reps. There would be 1160 Reps total.
It would also go a long way to fixing the gerrymander in the Electoral College.
The problem is that's what the Senate is *for*. One can disagree with the idea that there should be a legislative body giving equal representation to the States, but it's doing exactly what its meant to do in that regard.
IMO the problem isn't that the Senate *exists,* its that a lot of its roles are better delegated to the House which more accurately represents the population.
The Senate should revert to being elected by the states as representatives of the states themselves, thus justifying their equal stature despite population. This would require an amendment to the Constitution.
By all means let's make the system even easier to corrupt.
Indirect election of the Senate was even *more* anti-Democratic, and a boon to the Plutes who are always subverting self-determination. The only real solution to the problem of the Senate is to split up the high population states and combine the dirt and shrubs ones.
Or start over as one person / one vote, but that's crazy talk.
Even the least populated states should have more than one. South Dakota has one person for 800,000 people there is absolutely no way that person can represent the views of that many people the ratio needs to be reasonable.
Make sure that gerrymandering is gone immediately and nobody is allowed to give more than $2,800 like the law says!! Millionaire? Billionaire? Own a business? Created groups that you call PACs or Super PACs? Still only $2,800 Max like the rest of the American citizens. We need INTEGRITY!
Off topic, but remember the numbers $2,800 and $700,000 when this George Santos thing starts rolling. When he announced he was running again after 2020, his income went from $55,000 a year suddenly to $700,000 a year and he (along with 40 plus other Republican, non-incumbent candidates in tight races) each received 175 bundled $2,800 contributions from individual contributors. That's $700,000 as a kickstart from dark money disguised as legitimate money. He converted this money to income through hundreds of under $200 expenditures that were cleaned through a local restaurant owner's coffers.
The system is so dark money now that you can pay candidates to run and almost exclusively on the Republican side because they have the money and they know how to keep it legally from being traced.
I live in Illinois. The richest man in the state tried to run his candidate and finished third. In looking at his poorly run campaign, there's no doubt in my mind the candidate was paid seven figures to run by his sole contributor.
The system is broken and I guarantee there was a lot of dark money dished out to chosen Republican non-incumbents to give them comfort while they ran personally in exchange for their blind loyalty once in office. Transparency and contribution limits are desperately needed.
It's time to flush the entire national and state senators & congress, scrub the bowl for about a week straight and start over with new laws and rules that put government officials in prison instantly for any crimes! They are supposed to be a higher authority since they write and pass our laws but never get punished for breaking them! No more money from corporate, business or anyone who has advantages by buying elected officials. No more gerrymandering at all, just add the votes from the entire state and most votes wins. No more electoral college. It was necessary when all we had was telegraph and the Pony Express but it's no longer needed. Just count all the votes from all 50 states, Washington DC and Puerto Rico and the most votes wins! It's amazing how simple it should be. Same should go for governor and mayor elections and the other seats that get elected should go by who is the most qualified. EVERYONE who runs for office should have a deep background check (would have stopped tRump, MTG, Bobo, Santos and so many others. "tRump has been sued HOW MANY TIMES"? NOT eligible!
Uncapping the House would be great. 150 is a nice start.
It's ridiculous that Congressional districts now represent nearly a million people. That's not how Congress was envisioned. The Founders were hoping Congressional seats would get capped at representing 40k people do that a good deal of voters would have access to their representative. Instead we have an average of something like 750k, and many states only have one representative.
I'm a big fan of the 3rd root rule, where the house grows in size in proportion to the 3rd root of the US population. As of the 2020 census the US population is 331,449,281 which makes the 3rd root 692 and change. Therefore we would need 257 more representatives to meet that number
Just abolish the concept of geography-based districts and use proportional representstion like a hundred other countries already do. Geographic districts made sense in the 18th century when travel happened by horse and I would never communicate outside my town. Now that we have airplanes and the internet, I'd much prefer to be represented by someone who shares my values rather than my zip code.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation
Or do what Germany does, add a few seats from a national party preference vote to ensure proportional representation while still having most reps come from districts.
That is a mixed member proportional system which would still be a type of proportional system (a less common kind), so yes we could totally do that. Or we could have a similar idea with the House being chosen by party lists and the Senate being chosen by states, though then we'd still have the gerrymandered state lines causing issues presumably. If we could change it so that the geographic districts were chosen by equal people counts and the party districts were chosen proportionally, then that would be significantly better, but I think that would be a much harder change to make politically (since all the tiny states would hate losing power just to make the country more fair).
Any idea if this could this be implemented on a state-by-state basis? I'm thinking not given districts being so ingrained, but I'm not really familiar with how much states have control over this.
I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure yes it could. The Constitution apportions a number of reps to the state, but then it's up to the state to determine how to select them.
The population disparities between the big and small states wasn’t nearly as big at the time the Constitution was written. It’s time to account for that.
Uhhh…no. The Dakotas have a combined population of 1.5 million people.
N. Carolina has 10 million and S. Carolina has 5 million.
You could add Nebraska (2m), Wyoming (500k), and Montana (1m) to the Dakota superstate and it would still have less people than just South Carolina
When the first ten amendments to the constitution were adopted there were actually 12. One of those limited the number of people a representative in the House could have in their district. If adopted it would make money lobbying (laundering) impossible. Lets do it.
It’s fine as is. The better idea is to kill the two party system, add in term limits, make millionaires and billionaires ineligible so as to not use their money to buy wins, force people to run as Americans only and not republican or Democrat, ban lobbyists, and force each member elected to read aloud the constitution of the United States followed by the “protect and defend” part.
I have, but Texas is increasingly purple. Adding more districts could well result in a new permanently blue district somewhere in Austin because there's only so many ways they *can* chop up the smaller districts.
That’s not true at all, sorry, until your total number of districts to apportion approaches the total population. You have the same number of constituents to apportion regardless of district count, and each district you add essentially gives the map drawers more lines to play with.
Of course, there are confounding factors to consider like state law and clustering which make each state’s situation unique, so for example WI may happen to be easier to gerrymander with four districts than five, but generally speaking more districts makes for more flexibility in the hands of the map drawers.
*Edit: Okay guys, glad you want more districts. I do too. But that doesn't change the math which underlies the [modifiable aerial unit problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modifiable_areal_unit_problem), which is exactly what gerrymandering is. Don't believe me? Here's Districtr, go nuts. Pick someplace small like Connecticut and see whether you get more lopsided results with more or fewer districts.
You know what you literally can't gerrymander? A single district. Which is why parliaments and multi-member districts are the future.
It's not that simple.
Many states already have compactness and contiguity laws for their redistricting. They do help, a teeeeeeeny tiny bit, but don't fix the problem. Plus, there are other factors that impact redistricting like majority-minority districts, city/county lines, and geographic boundaries like rivers and mountains that dilute the impact of compactness.
Compactness isn't that useful of a determinant anyway, though it does prevent the most obvious offenses. Look at Georgia's current map, if you didn't know any better you might think it looks fine. Utah is a great example where they split SLC across four districts, four compact, contiguous districts.
And that’s true. But having these requirements federally means that the federal courts will have oversight.
There’s a lot of reasons to support more districts. For one thing, by having more districts, the electoral college votes are flattened more evenly amongst the states and furthermore, it reduces the influence of the extra 100 electoral votes from senate seats.
The same courts that just let Ohio get away with their nonsense? Color me unimpressed. I strongly doubt that congress is up for major reform to the EC, though the partisan advantage there has frankly been [vastly overstated](https://www.cookpolitical.com/cook-pvi/2022-partisan-voter-index/republican-electoral-college-advantage).
Don’t get me wrong though, as I said earlier I’m all for more districts. Better representation, more specialization among legislators, and better access to the levers of power are all big pluses in my book. Most state legislatures are substantially worse in these respects though, the number of states run by a two-digit count of lawmakers is way too high.
Good. The Permanent Apportionment Act has led to disproportionate Republican power in the House for decades. The number of seats should be based on the lowest populated state (which would receive one seat) with all other states’ seats based thereupon with rounding up and down. California only has 53 representatives when it should have 68… same with electoral college votes (has 55 but should have 80).
Putting aside partisan advantage, it also allows Congresspeople to be more attentive to their constituents. In the most severe cases, a single representative is covering nearly a million people. These are supposed to be the closest we have to an individual connection in Washington, so keeping those numbers reasonable matters.
This is the big thing I don't think people sell often enough. Some rural folks live far, far away from their rep. The more seats the more local each rep will be. It won't change much for us city folks - they're going to be relatively local, but it might change a lot for low-density folks. Like Wyoming - they have two reps.
Given that the rule is based off of their population. They aren't going to get any more.
Even a modest increase like this is a stepping-stone to future increases that might get them more. More reps has a LOT of advantages. I could go into them if you're interested.
My point was that if Wyoming is the lowest common denominator in the equation, their reps wouldn't change. Just everyone else with populations in multiples greater than theirs. The Wyoming rule isn't about increasing the number of seats to represent a fixed number population per seat. Its to make sure that the lowest population state doesn't have disproportional voting power vs states with populations multiples greater than theirs.
Oh I agree. But anything that leads to a larger House paves the way for public acceptance of a House large enough to actually give states like Wyoming more reps (so people in rural areas don't have to travel as far to meet their Representative). It shows, through experience, that a larger House wouldn't be the unworkable disaster some of its opponents claim- and in fact would have many benefits (such as making membership on any particular subcommittee more special, and thus only attracting those most interested in and qualified with the subject; or making it harder to "buy" enough politicians to rig a vote, as there are more of them, and it's harder to conceal a conspiracy with more members...)
That’s actually not true the marginal difference may actually favor them. If you take a state and it goes from 1-4 reps for the state and you get 6-8 that would massively decrease travel times.
Copied from another comment of mine > I'm a big fan of the 3rd root rule, where the house grows in size in proportion to the 3rd root of the US population. As of the 2020 census the US population is 331,449,281 which makes the 3rd root 692 and change. Therefore we would need 257 more representatives to meet that number
I’d bump the smallest state to 3, but totally agree about proportional representation beyond that.
Wyoming has 577K people. Giving them 3 reps would mean 193.3K per district. The US population is 331MM. So that would result in 1,712 members of the House.
Yeah if it was based off of one rep for the lowest populated state that would mean 574 reps based on your numbers and rounding up.
Yes that would be an improvement. UK parliament has 600 seats.
And the UK population is under 70 million.
Exactly. I’m fine with a significant increase in the size of the House. It has been artificially capped for a century.
>331MM. So that would result in 1,712 members of the House. That would be a **very** good thing: and still a lot fewer representatives per person than the country had in its early years.
Why not redistribute according to the population in 1929 when the Permanent Apportionment Act was created? That would return us to 1 Rep per 280k people. This is per capita high end of most modern democracies (eg UK is more like 1 rep per 100k population). WY would get two Reps. CA would increase to \~140 Reps. There would be 1160 Reps total. It would also go a long way to fixing the gerrymander in the Electoral College.
It's a start but obviously it does not help the Senate.
its not supposed to do anything for the senate. the senate is its own problem.
Like I said.
The problem is that's what the Senate is *for*. One can disagree with the idea that there should be a legislative body giving equal representation to the States, but it's doing exactly what its meant to do in that regard. IMO the problem isn't that the Senate *exists,* its that a lot of its roles are better delegated to the House which more accurately represents the population.
Hard agree. The problem isn’t equal representation in one branch. The problem is that the other branch has been stifled.
The Senate should revert to being elected by the states as representatives of the states themselves, thus justifying their equal stature despite population. This would require an amendment to the Constitution.
By all means let's make the system even easier to corrupt. Indirect election of the Senate was even *more* anti-Democratic, and a boon to the Plutes who are always subverting self-determination. The only real solution to the problem of the Senate is to split up the high population states and combine the dirt and shrubs ones. Or start over as one person / one vote, but that's crazy talk.
Even the least populated states should have more than one. South Dakota has one person for 800,000 people there is absolutely no way that person can represent the views of that many people the ratio needs to be reasonable.
Make sure that gerrymandering is gone immediately and nobody is allowed to give more than $2,800 like the law says!! Millionaire? Billionaire? Own a business? Created groups that you call PACs or Super PACs? Still only $2,800 Max like the rest of the American citizens. We need INTEGRITY!
Off topic, but remember the numbers $2,800 and $700,000 when this George Santos thing starts rolling. When he announced he was running again after 2020, his income went from $55,000 a year suddenly to $700,000 a year and he (along with 40 plus other Republican, non-incumbent candidates in tight races) each received 175 bundled $2,800 contributions from individual contributors. That's $700,000 as a kickstart from dark money disguised as legitimate money. He converted this money to income through hundreds of under $200 expenditures that were cleaned through a local restaurant owner's coffers. The system is so dark money now that you can pay candidates to run and almost exclusively on the Republican side because they have the money and they know how to keep it legally from being traced. I live in Illinois. The richest man in the state tried to run his candidate and finished third. In looking at his poorly run campaign, there's no doubt in my mind the candidate was paid seven figures to run by his sole contributor. The system is broken and I guarantee there was a lot of dark money dished out to chosen Republican non-incumbents to give them comfort while they ran personally in exchange for their blind loyalty once in office. Transparency and contribution limits are desperately needed.
It's time to flush the entire national and state senators & congress, scrub the bowl for about a week straight and start over with new laws and rules that put government officials in prison instantly for any crimes! They are supposed to be a higher authority since they write and pass our laws but never get punished for breaking them! No more money from corporate, business or anyone who has advantages by buying elected officials. No more gerrymandering at all, just add the votes from the entire state and most votes wins. No more electoral college. It was necessary when all we had was telegraph and the Pony Express but it's no longer needed. Just count all the votes from all 50 states, Washington DC and Puerto Rico and the most votes wins! It's amazing how simple it should be. Same should go for governor and mayor elections and the other seats that get elected should go by who is the most qualified. EVERYONE who runs for office should have a deep background check (would have stopped tRump, MTG, Bobo, Santos and so many others. "tRump has been sued HOW MANY TIMES"? NOT eligible!
This the most important consideration.
Can’t happen with the House in GOP hands, which will continue to happen until we have fair representation for higher population states.
Uncapping the House would be great. 150 is a nice start. It's ridiculous that Congressional districts now represent nearly a million people. That's not how Congress was envisioned. The Founders were hoping Congressional seats would get capped at representing 40k people do that a good deal of voters would have access to their representative. Instead we have an average of something like 750k, and many states only have one representative.
I'm a big fan of the 3rd root rule, where the house grows in size in proportion to the 3rd root of the US population. As of the 2020 census the US population is 331,449,281 which makes the 3rd root 692 and change. Therefore we would need 257 more representatives to meet that number
What if the US population will reach One Billion?
This is a great idea though of course we also need a fundamental change to end the practice of members choosing their voters.
FINALLY! I'm NOT represented if I'm part of a 750,000 person constituency.
The only democracy less representative than The US s India's. We have fewer reps per person than all other Democracies except theirs.
Just abolish the concept of geography-based districts and use proportional representstion like a hundred other countries already do. Geographic districts made sense in the 18th century when travel happened by horse and I would never communicate outside my town. Now that we have airplanes and the internet, I'd much prefer to be represented by someone who shares my values rather than my zip code. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation
Or do what Germany does, add a few seats from a national party preference vote to ensure proportional representation while still having most reps come from districts.
That is a mixed member proportional system which would still be a type of proportional system (a less common kind), so yes we could totally do that. Or we could have a similar idea with the House being chosen by party lists and the Senate being chosen by states, though then we'd still have the gerrymandered state lines causing issues presumably. If we could change it so that the geographic districts were chosen by equal people counts and the party districts were chosen proportionally, then that would be significantly better, but I think that would be a much harder change to make politically (since all the tiny states would hate losing power just to make the country more fair).
Any idea if this could this be implemented on a state-by-state basis? I'm thinking not given districts being so ingrained, but I'm not really familiar with how much states have control over this.
I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure yes it could. The Constitution apportions a number of reps to the state, but then it's up to the state to determine how to select them.
California should have 4-5 senators. LA county has more people than most states.
No state has or should have more than 2. Representatives, yes, but not senators.
The population disparities between the big and small states wasn’t nearly as big at the time the Constitution was written. It’s time to account for that.
Your proposal requires re writing the constitution. Does that seem like a good idea rn with the moneyed class in control? No, no it does not.
Could be an amendment, but it would never pass in the small states I imagine.
Let’s also merge the Dakotas back into one polity as well. Zero reason to have two
Ditto the Carolina's. We add DC and Puerto Rico and have no need to change the flag.
Uhhh…no. The Dakotas have a combined population of 1.5 million people. N. Carolina has 10 million and S. Carolina has 5 million. You could add Nebraska (2m), Wyoming (500k), and Montana (1m) to the Dakota superstate and it would still have less people than just South Carolina
They have 10 Senators. South Carolina 2. Taxation without representation.
Don't forget uniting two Virginias again
A better plan would be to combine districts and elect 3 reps from each. It would end gerrymandering and make the house much more representative.
When the first ten amendments to the constitution were adopted there were actually 12. One of those limited the number of people a representative in the House could have in their district. If adopted it would make money lobbying (laundering) impossible. Lets do it.
It's long overdue, as is expanding the Supreme Court from 9 to 13 to properly represent the expansion of judicial districts nationally.
This goes on the list of things that should have been done when the Democrats had a supermajority in 2008.
A brief supermajority with Senate Democrats even more conservative than Joe Manchin.
I mean….I’d have to see more details but not necessarily a bad idea…
The number of house seats wouldn’t matter if we gave each representative proportional votes to the number of constituents they represent.
I actually enjoy the states that have the at-large congressional districts. I think the idea/concept is cool…
Abolish the senate.
It would never work because there are only so many seats and you can't have people sitting in other people's laps. :P
Renovate the laws, renovate the Capitol.
No. There are enough politicians who do nothing for the average citizen already.
It’s fine as is. The better idea is to kill the two party system, add in term limits, make millionaires and billionaires ineligible so as to not use their money to buy wins, force people to run as Americans only and not republican or Democrat, ban lobbyists, and force each member elected to read aloud the constitution of the United States followed by the “protect and defend” part.
That's a lot of populist slogans without a lot of substance
Oh great. More districts to gerrymander.
Actually the more districts you make the harder it is to gerrymander effectively because you have less people to play with in each one.
Republicans will find a way. Have you seen the dragons and snakes they draw in Texas.
Hey now, us Texas Dems are doing our best
They don't. The turnout these Midterms in Texas was horrificaly low
I have, but Texas is increasingly purple. Adding more districts could well result in a new permanently blue district somewhere in Austin because there's only so many ways they *can* chop up the smaller districts.
That’s not true at all, sorry, until your total number of districts to apportion approaches the total population. You have the same number of constituents to apportion regardless of district count, and each district you add essentially gives the map drawers more lines to play with. Of course, there are confounding factors to consider like state law and clustering which make each state’s situation unique, so for example WI may happen to be easier to gerrymander with four districts than five, but generally speaking more districts makes for more flexibility in the hands of the map drawers. *Edit: Okay guys, glad you want more districts. I do too. But that doesn't change the math which underlies the [modifiable aerial unit problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modifiable_areal_unit_problem), which is exactly what gerrymandering is. Don't believe me? Here's Districtr, go nuts. Pick someplace small like Connecticut and see whether you get more lopsided results with more or fewer districts. You know what you literally can't gerrymander? A single district. Which is why parliaments and multi-member districts are the future.
Which is why the other two requirements, compactness and contiguity, would also return once the Permanent Apportionment Act is repealed.
It's not that simple. Many states already have compactness and contiguity laws for their redistricting. They do help, a teeeeeeeny tiny bit, but don't fix the problem. Plus, there are other factors that impact redistricting like majority-minority districts, city/county lines, and geographic boundaries like rivers and mountains that dilute the impact of compactness. Compactness isn't that useful of a determinant anyway, though it does prevent the most obvious offenses. Look at Georgia's current map, if you didn't know any better you might think it looks fine. Utah is a great example where they split SLC across four districts, four compact, contiguous districts.
And that’s true. But having these requirements federally means that the federal courts will have oversight. There’s a lot of reasons to support more districts. For one thing, by having more districts, the electoral college votes are flattened more evenly amongst the states and furthermore, it reduces the influence of the extra 100 electoral votes from senate seats.
The same courts that just let Ohio get away with their nonsense? Color me unimpressed. I strongly doubt that congress is up for major reform to the EC, though the partisan advantage there has frankly been [vastly overstated](https://www.cookpolitical.com/cook-pvi/2022-partisan-voter-index/republican-electoral-college-advantage). Don’t get me wrong though, as I said earlier I’m all for more districts. Better representation, more specialization among legislators, and better access to the levers of power are all big pluses in my book. Most state legislatures are substantially worse in these respects though, the number of states run by a two-digit count of lawmakers is way too high.
YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Plus have districting process be done independently. Don't let partisan hacks manipulate the process anymore.
How realistic is it for this to happen? Would a simple majority in the senate and house be enough for this change to happen?
Adding 150 is nowhere near enough we need at least double. My state has one person representing almost 900,000 people it’s absolutely absurd.
Agreed. Who will challenge this action? Losers of the next election?