Constitutional Maximum for the House

Great Debates
21

Yeah. The problem with the Wyoming Rule is that the rounding is still too lumpy at the low end. The problem with the current House system isn’t that one small state has more power than its population indicates. It’s that due to rounding people in some small states end up extra powerful and people in other small states end up extra powerless. The medium and big states mostly end up in the middle with smallish epsilons vs. the overall average power per voter.

IOW, Montana has 1.75x the population of Wyoming but under the WR would still only get 1 rep. Lots of smallish states have a similar problems.

One way to fix that is to say that the max permissible rounding error is some arbitrary but small percentage, say 10%. And then use the smallest House member quantity necessary to ensure the worst case delta between the most over- and under-populated district is less than that epsilon.

Another way to fix it, albeit one fraught with a different set of risks, is to decouple the headcount from the voting power to achieve this same outcome. IOW, if our unit of representation is, arbitrarily, 100K citizens and we’re using the 2010 census numbers, then we could keep 435 reps as now, but …

The 1 rep in Wyoming gets 6 votes and the 1 rep in Montana gets 10. Meanwhile the 53 reps in California get to split up 373 votes between them. Which could be done as 7 apiece = 371, plus the leftover 2 votes distributed on the same percentage as the individual votes went. Which in practice probably means one vote for and one vote against on most questions. etc.

An obvious issue here is that each very small state will almost always vote all its votes unanimously. Whereas bigger stats will tend to vote, at most, 60/40 one way or the other. Which further amplifies the Senate problem.

As Chronos almost just said, if we’re a unitary nation, the Senate is the problem. If we’re really a loose confederation of 50 equal sovereigns then the House is the problem.

The meta-problem is that our paperwork says the latter and our reality since about 1875 is ever-increasingly the former. With no evidence that will or should reverse for anything less than a cataclysm.

22

I see some issues with our current numbers that could be alleviated by an increase. I see some problems with 10k reps. I agree that they Wyoming Rule is too lumpy. I’m not sure how I feel about the multiple votes per rep.

This is arbitrary, but does anyone know how many people we could easily fit in the House chamber? I don’t know how densely packed they are now or how dense it could be. Some examples of crowded chambers in other countries might be useful.

23

Proportional representation has to be in the mix.

10,000 might be too many, but 1,000 could be doable.

24

I’ve proposed this idea myself, so I will start by saying that I agree with it.

There are some obvious drawbacks, of course, but that is going to b the case with any system of governance, so it is not a matter of whether it has no flaws, but whether it has fewer, or at least more tenable flaws, then the current system.

To solve a few of the problems that have been raised, I have some solutions.

As far as electing them, I think that should be left to the states for the most part. Each state is told, this is how many representatives you get, and the state decides how to apportion them, as long as they are apportioned equally by population.

That way, if a state feels it is better to have districts for each rep, or elect them at large, or have larger districts from which multiple are elected at large each, or some other hybrid that seems to fill the constituent’s needs.

My personal recommendation would be 50% in small districts of 50-60k, 25% elected at large over the state, and another 25% elected at large out of several equal sized districts. Ohio, for instance, would have 5.

This would give you more cohesive state coalitions, helping with the “no one knows anyone else” problem. At large gives you the ability to have ranked membership as well, so your highest vote getter would be the head of the state coalition, with the highest of the minority party being the minority party leader.

You have an individual rep for your district, representing ~50k people. This makes them much more accessible than one that has 700,000 constituents. Representatives do more than just vote too, they are an agent of the federal government to whom you can turn for assistance in bureaucratic or other federal needs. Right now, they don’t have time for you, especially if you are not of their party.

It would be far easier to get elected. Only half of the constituents will be registered to vote, and only half of them actually will, so you only need to get 10,000 votes, and you are golden. You could get elected as easily as you could on a small city or town’s council. You won’t need major campaign contributions or staffs. You could literally do all your campaigning with a few friends and a thousand dollar budget at office depot.

You would mostly hang out with your party’s state coalition, and would likely be close allies with reps from neighboring districts.

The elected at large candidates would be the ones that spend more time in washington, doing their networking thing with other representatives of other states. You would never really need to have all of them under the same roof, and wouldn’t plan on doing so for anything other than major events like SOTU addresses, with most reps staying in their districts through the majority of their terms, and voting remotely. Your number of working reps in washington would not be changed by all that much.

An interesting thought I have had on this, as well. This is more of a stretch, as everything I have proposed before is, I believe, entirely constitutional, and only needs laws to be changed, and this idea would require an amendment, but it is one I like.

You don’t base the number of reps on the number of people living in your district, you base it on the number of people who voted. This should discourage voter suppression and disenfranchisement.

25

If you had >10K congressional districts of 30K people each, it would just be that many more races to dump money into. Based on what’s happening these days at the state level, I’d say that works out better for the Koch brothers than for the rest of us.

Also, I’m sure CDs of 30K people can be gerrymandered. It’s all about the computer software.

I kinda like the Wyoming Rule, though.

26

Voting for representatives at large or in multi-member districts have a severe problem: they suppress minority representation. And I mean “minority” in the most general sense (for example, Republicans in California as well as racial minorities). What happens is a majority ends up choosing all of the representatives. Many cities in California have been successfully sued because their city council seats were selected this way.

I think smaller districts greatly dilute the impact of money on an election. Blanket advertising that’s easy to buy won’t be as effective as people with local connections. When a television market has dozens of districts, advertising there is mostly wasting money. Someone who’s active in their community is going to personally know hundreds of people–that’s influence money can’t buy. And a local group with a few hundred people will possibly be able to literally talk to every voter in a district.

Gerrymandering is a lot more difficult when districts are less than 5% of their current size. It’ll take a real stretch for a district to reach both the inner city and rural areas. Sure, there will be gerrymandering on the edges, but the fraction of districts affected will be smaller than now. We’ll still need laws to fix gerrymandering, but smaller districts helps the situation.

(Just to be clear, while I’d prefer the Constitutional maximum number of representatives in the House, I’d be happy with any increase in number. So long as it doesn’t involve proportional or at-large mechanics.)

27

If you have at large, with a large enough number of people to be elected, the minorities get represented fairly well.

In this system, Ohio would get around 200 reps.

100 of them would be CD’s

50 of them would be across the state, and the other 50 would be divided across 5 districts, each kinda centered around one of the cities.

Having 50 at large means that they only need an average of 2% support to win. As there will be many who get much greater than 2%, there will be others who get in on much less.

It seems to me that having a large number of reps elected at large would increase the minority representation substantially, rather than diminish it.

If you went all “at large” for the entirety of the 200, then you would only need .5%, or about 56k population (translating into like 15k actual voters) or less to clear the threshold and get elected.

Advertising and campaign contributions would have an effect on very few races. Spending more on a candidate just means they win more votes, which means very little once they have cleared the number needed.

To me, an at large system gives more representation to minority voters.

I completely agree with the rest of this.

28

This probably deserves its own thread, and I’m not familiar enough to discuss the issue well. In California at least, at-large districts are considered not good for minorities. I haven’t found a good explanation online, but here’s one news article, North County – San Diego Union-Tribune .

I think our disconnect is how at-large voting works. You’re probably thinking: every voter votes for one candidate. The candidates with the top N votes fill the N seats. But that is not how at-large voting works. Instead: because there are N seats to fill, every voter votes for N candidates. Then the candidates with the top N votes fill the N seats.

Now maybe that is all particular to how voting is done in California. Maybe it’s done differently in other states. But every city in California that was sued to fixed its at-large voting has switched to single-seat districts, instead of some other structure.

29

Your link just goes to the page, not to an article, so I am not sure exactly what it goes into.

But, I feel that one of the problems with at large voting is that you are usually only voting on a small handful of people, 3-5 at most. Voting on 50 changes things I bit, I would think.

There are also other methods of voting for at large candidates, you can just go with one vote per person, you can go with a vote per seat, you can go with a vote for every two seats, or you could use a ranking system.

While I can certainly see how at large voting can disenfranchise small voting groups, I do not think that it has to be done that way.

30

Sorry,

Yes, if it’s possible to have one vote per voter in a multi-seat district, then that would resolve most of my issue. I’m concerned that that is not possible, at least in California, or else some of the sued cities would’ve adopted it.

31

If we are going to make major reforms like this, we should just go all the way—remove the states as the unit from which the national government is chosen. All legislators at the national level should represent people, not states, and states should have no control over how they are chosen.

32

Greater structural reform to the federal government would be interesting to discuss. But implementing it would require a constitutional amendment at a minimum and constitutional convention if the Senate is significantly changed.

On the other hand, changing the number of representatives in the House needs only an Act of Congress, as long as it stays within the current constitutional bounds.

33

I find the idea of a 10,000 member House of Representatives intriguing. How would political life change when there were so many more Reps per voter? Here in Pennsylvania I believe we have more elected representatives than anywhere else in the nation but I don’t feel any closer to the state government. This would be a much larger change of course. Could it be radically different?

I’d like to think this proposed increase in the House would result in greater contact between elected and electorate with more of a sense of responsibility from the former to the latter but I see a list of obstacles. Campaign finance being the first. Politicians are incredibly cheap for corporations to buy compared to the profits to be had. I think it’s feeble-minded to allow a system where elected officials spend a good portion of their working day cold calling people to beg for money. I’d much rather see these extra Representatives spending most of their time outside Washington DC among constituents doing retail politics on the actual issues of the week.

(Hi Opal.)

I also worry about the committee system. The size of important committees can be increased but the reality is that either most of these new Representatives will occasionally be important as votes on the Floor but not in the business of the House OR so many new fiefdoms will be erected to give them a say in the process that our incredibly inefficient system becomes even more cumbersome.

34

I would think that if there are thousands of legislators then the elected representatives themselves would take over the functional roles now filled by salaried staff.

35

Tiny districts would help with campaign finance, because the cost to door-knock on or deliver mail to every residence in a district would be substantially cheaper than now. And using money to buy mass-media advertisements in a district that’s a tiny fraction of a media market would become very wasteful and so not very helpful for boosting a representative. That is, a representative would have little trouble raising enough money to effectively campaign in their tiny district, while raising the huge sums needed to advertise on television would not gain much advantage.

For example, the Los Angeles metro currently has about 20 representatives. That’d increase to over 400. An ad shown on TV would go from being relevant to about 5% of watchers to about 0.2%. Even a metro area with currently only one representative, would go from 100% relevance to about 5%. TV ads would simply not be relevant to congressional races.

36

I like the idea behind this, but not the approach.

Some of you may remember a system that I advocated for in the past that happens to have a resemblance to the “Soviet” system, but it’s entirely coincidental and there are plenty of distinctions that could be made. The basic idea is that instead of having voters vote for their homeowner’s association board, their city council, their county commissioners, their state legislators, and their Congresscritters, they only vote for the lowest position that’s available to them. Each of those lowest-level bodies then becomes not only the body who govern the polity, whatever it is, but also those who choose the representatives in the next level of government, and so up in a pyramid. Each level of government would effectively be its own parliamentary system, where a group that is able to get just over half the votes of the body would choose its government. I say “votes” since I believe the only way to safely allocate voting power would be to have each person’s voting power vary based on how many people that person actually represents. I also am greatly in favor of proportional representation, where anyone that garners at least some level of support (what level it would be would depend exactly on how the elections would work) would get a seat at the table with a corresponding amount of voting power, much like how shareholders in a company get votes based on how many shares they own. Here, the shares would be the number of actual voters at the base of the pyramid.

This obviously would be way way harder to implement, and there are a lot of details that would need to be worked out, but I think it’s the absolute best way of getting government that is most responsive to the people and would lead to better outcomes all around. Some of the ideas might be able to work their way into the current thread’s proposal though. Perhaps we should still have around a few hundred Congresscritters, but have them chosen by a larger body that meets specifically for that purpose that has numbers around what was proposed and passes on the number of voters they represent instead of just following a one-representative-one-vote policy.

37

The OP should try to get this amendment ratified. It worked for the 27th.

38

Sure, that would fix it. But an even simpler fix is to have Congress change the number of representatives. Of course, what Congressman would vote to reduce their own political power? So maybe having the states ratify that amendment would be easier. Only 27 more states needed!

39

One way to eliminate gerrymandering would be to require the states to redistrict using USPS zip code boundaries as a starting map. The zip code areas would be either merged together or divided as needed so that the population to representation ration is maintained. For example, Texas (as of 2010 census) gets 45 reps. It would have to create 45 new areas, based on zip codes, where each district contains approximately 558,790 citizens (plus or minus some allowable amount). If an area has to include multiple zip codes, they must be adjacent to one another. In that manner, you eliminate crap like Texas Congressional District 35.

Texas has about 250 zip codes, so each rep should theoretically cover at least 5 zip codes or zo.

Requiring reps to physically live (not just own property) in their districts would be another good step.