Exactly. The first step of effective gerrymandering is to cram as many voters of the other party as you can into a handful of districts, so you’ve got comfortable majorities everywhere else.
Take a hypothetical state with equal numbers of Dem and GOP voters overall, and 5 Congressional districts. If the GOP controls the legislature and can create a district with a 90-10 Dem majority, they’ve got a 60-40 majority over the rest of the state, and can spread that advantage evenly over the remaining 4 districts.
This, exactly. The U.S. population grew by 7.4% from 2010 to 2020; a state which saw its own population grow more slowly than that (or even contract, as Illinois’s population did) saw its proportion of the U.S. population decline – and, thus, is now seeing its representation in the House shrinking, as well, since the number of seats in the House remains static.
Yes, this is a very good idea with a very easy argument to make to the voters. I can’t imagine that the practical objections stand up to much scrutiny - the House has survived the pandemic with a much reduced capacity in the chamber and other than some bitching and moaning it has worked out OK. There is no reason voting has to be done in person that I am aware of.
Does anybody know if any legislation has been proposed on this front? I wonder if the fact that it (marginally) reduces the power of each representative is enough to scuttle it.
ETA: I suppose that Senators from small states would oppose it too, since their reps get outsized influence under the current system.
That’s the exact number I got using one set of census estimates last week. But the population of the country is four times what it was when the House moved to its current number. I’ve been thinking lately that we should have a “double Wyoming Rule” instead , which gets us over 1,100 congresscritters.
Shouldn’t the unit be based on the largest state with only one rep? According to this, that would be Delaware with 975,033. So every state gets one House rep for every increment of 975K people, e.g a state with 976K people would get two.
How do you calculate that? Not thinking too hard about it it seems you would need to know the total size of the House before you could determine which state is the largest with 1?
Whereas dividing total population by the smallest state sets the size, and then the current algorithm for assigning could be used. Simple to calculate, and it would reset with each census.
As to “double Wyoming”, the original proposed first amendment would have us at 6,000 members (one per 50,000).
I was going with @Red_Wiggler’s suggestion that the House better reflect the larger US population. Give every state as many reps as they need based on units of 975K, and that’s your House. I don’t know the exact number you’d get, but 330 million divided by 975K is about 338, which seems pretty reasonable. (I know the actual number would be higher, but it wouldn’t be more than 400.)
I guess I’m not clear about the benefits of actually reducing the number of reps. And I’m also unclear as to why we’re choosing Delaware’s population as the baseline instead of the smallest political unit. Delaware gets two reps using the Wyoming Rule, at least if we’re using normal rounding.
Of course. If a states population shrunk relative to the growth in the smallest state they would lose reps. The same methods they use today for redistricting would be followed. Though in an ideal world that would be non-partisan.
It’ll vary by state, and how, exactly, they re-draw their districts. In some states, this is done by the state legislature; in other states, it may be done by a bi-partisan commission.
For example, Illinois currently has 18 congressional districts; as they re-draw the districts, they now need to come up with a districting map that has only 17 districts. It’s unlikely that they would do so by simply merging two current districts, as (AIUI) each district has to have a similar number of residents.
In states in which the process is controlled by the “in power” party, it’s probably safe to assume that the redistricting will be more beneficial to their party.
Wyoming gets two reps and everyone else gets a proportionate number. If you have 1.5 the population of Wyoming, you get three reps. South Dakota and Delaware come to mind.
Along a similar line, my idea is that the state with the lowest population, in this case Wyoming, gets 1 vote for its one representative. Then each state gets a number of votes proportional to their population, but divided among their existing number of representatives.
For example, California gets (39,747,267 ÷ 572,381) = ~69.44 votes, which divided among its 52 representatives, means each California representative gets ~1.3354 votes.
This way, there is no need to expand the size of the House chamber, nor to get extra seating. Also, it allows states to keep their existing district lines and avoid doing all the work of redistricting.
Every state always needs to redistrict after every census anyway (except for those that have only one seat both before and after), because the districts all need to be the same size, and even if the state’s population is static (relative to the nation as a whole), the people will have moved around some in the state. Now, it usually happens that the new districts mostly resemble the old districts, and are assigned the same numbers as the old districts they used to resemble, but there’s no reason it has to be that way: A two-seat state could be divided into two horizontal stripes one cycle, and two vertical stripes the next, if that’s the way the map-makers wanted to do it.