OK, people have been arguing about the Electoral College in one way or another since the 2000 election. There’s a lot of talk about how it protects the “small” states from being over whelmed by the “big” states. (You know, the ones with so many people in them.)
Well, that’s not a bad argument, even when it’s used as rationalization for “My guy won, na na na na.”
But I just realized that it does that even more so than the founders intended as an unintended consequence of the Apportionment act of 1911 which limited the size of the House of Representatives to 435 members.
Consider this: The smallest state, in terms of population is Wyoming: Population 582,658. It has the Constitutional minimum of one Representative. The largest is California: Population 38,802,500. It currently has 53 Representatives. But if California were to have a Representative for each 582,658 people, it would have 67 (66.59) Representatives. Folks in California, and other large states, are being “short-changed”. (Feel free to check my math.) The solution is simple, lift the cap on the size of the House of Representatives.
If this were changed, “protection” of the small states would be preserved as each state would still get the two “bonus” electors in the Electoral College and would continue to operate in the government as a whole due to the composition of the U.S. Senate. But no longer would they derive the extra protection that comes from the present arrangement.
The beauty of this idea is that it would not require a Constitutional amendment to implement but could be done by simple statute. It is even possible that a legal case could be made that the present arrangement violates “one man, one vote” or the equal protection clause.
What do people think?
I think any scheme that tips the balance toward one party or the other is DOA. Does your proposal do that?
I’ve discussed the Apportionment Act recently. Yes, changing it would not involve Amending the Constitution. It’s just a law. Write a new one!
However, I don’t see the party that’s gotten two (2) presidents in office recently due to this imbalance in representation agreeing to any change.
In Britain, since Lady Thatcher at the least, the Conservatives have formed governments whilst only having received c30% of the vote regularly.
They remain strongly opposed to proportional representing systems of any kind.
If this is to be believed, the most screwed states aren’t necessarily the big ones. (look at the population per House seat columns). Lots of small states have high numbers there.
Damn… doublepost.
I’d love to see how that works out, mathematically.
But why DOA? The party with the majority writes it into law…if it benefits them. (There are ways around the Filibuster.)
The trouble is granularity. In order to avoid having large variations in total people represented per Representative, you have to have significantly more Representatives than exist currently. I highlighted this in a prior post on the EC. Montana in 2010 had just a hair under 1,000,000 people resident in the state. It got 1 Representative. Rhode Island had just 64,000 more people, but it got 2 Representatives. This means that each Representative in Rhode Island represents half the number of people as in Montana.
Can you imagine what the House would be like if we increased the number of legislators in it to, say, 1300 or so? I can’t, and I’m not sure I want to. :dubious:
You’d have to convince House members to vote for drastically diluting their own power. I suspect most won’t, regardless of which party benefits.
Well, it is supposed to be the people’s branch and therefore having more people wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. I know it would be hard to get it passed but I think it would be easier to get passed than an amendment.
Also, no one has picked up on the lawsuit possibility. I’d love to see a couple of lawyers weigh in with conflicting opinions.
“Granularity” is less of a problem with no fixed cap. You just start with Wyoming (or whatever state is smallest). That population gets a value of “one” and in order to get to a second rep you need at least “one point five”. Obviously it’s never going to come out exactly even and I’m not suggesting that it should, merely that the present cap penalizes the really big states in order that Wyoming, Montana and Vermont get even one representative.
Been done in other threads.
Here is the problem: my Congresscritter is of the wrong stripe, and, with current districting, that is not going to change. He seems to be a decent dude, more or less – not one of the foaming extremists – but he is basically a party cog. He might have slightly divergent opinions compared to the broader party, but that amounts to nothing. They caucus, he goes along with them. Increase the House to a thousand-plus members and that particular situation becomes amplified. You just end up with more cogs. More is not an improvement.
I don’t think we need to bother adding more congressmen to congress, it would get people closer to their congressmen and dilute the power of each member… actually that does sound good, but also unfeasible.
How about something that keeps the spirit with the same number of representatives? In the house, the peoples house, it is no longer determined by 1 representative 1 vote. The lowest representation by population = 1 vote, and everyone with more than that gets some multiple of that such that if representative B represented TWICE the population of representative A based on the census, representative B would have a weighted vote of two points and not 1.
If conservatives in state legislatures want to load up all the democrats in a city and have 1 democrat represent them, fine, but that higher population gets more votes.
There might be a danger in that it could allow some gaming in the reverse direction. the degree of complications with this idea could get insane, but it’s an idea.
No. No, no, no, no, no.
Really big states actually are penalized LESS than small states that are near the upper boundary of a change in number of representatives. That’s because larger states have sufficient populations to allow for enough granularity so that it all evens out. You can see the effect here at Wiki’s list of states and territories by population. The state with the smallest number of people per Representative is Rhode Island, with 2 Reps each representing 526,000 people (as of the 2010 census). The largest number per Representative occurs in Montana, with one Rep for 989,000 people. But the large states all have roughly 700,000 people per representative. You have to get down to 8 reps per state to find the first states with variances from the average of more than 5% (Missouri and Minnesota, just barely over and under, respectively). Variances of more than 10% don’t show up until you get down the list to 3 per state for the unders (West Va. and Nebr.), or 2 per state for the overs (Idaho).
In short, the method used to establish how many representatives a state gets is fairly good at evening out the bumps, once you get past the three per state mark.
Now, if you were to use the 563,000 people of Wyoming as 1 “unit”, and then apportion accordingly, that would only get you about an extra 100 Representatives, which would not be sufficient granularity to even out the fluctuations at the bottom end of the list.
If you imagine it like the Galactic Senate from Star Wars, it’s kinda cool. Seemed to work for them! 
FWIW, Trump would have won the electoral vote no matter what the size of Congress was, whether 50 or 50,000. His victory is due to the Winner-Take-All feature: he won his key states by a narrow margin, while Clinton won overwhelmingly in the big states she did win.
Congressional apportionment is non-trivial: With the adjusted 2010 census in use, Clinton would have 2 more EV’s if the Jefferson apportionment method were in use, as it was from 1790-1839. (In 1840, Congress approved a switch(*) to a variant of Hamilton apportionment, which would give the same result as the present system.) Adams’ proposed apportionment algorithm (never adopted), OTOH, would have increased Trump’s EV lead by 4.
(* - Congress had originally approved the Hamilton method in 1790, but George Washington vetoed it, one of only two vetoes he ever made.)
It’s interesting you mention Washington’s veto. He apparently had some strong views on the issue of apportionment of representatives. If you’ll recall, the only recorded comments he made during the Constitutional Convention (on an issue of substance) had to do with recommending that the Convention reduce the minimum number of people who could be represented by a House member to 30,000 (from 40,000 IIRC).
That Washington: you couldn’t get the guy to shut up sometimes. 
As for the issue of the EC win, it’s important to point out that, even if we strip away from the states the automatic two EVs for their Senators, putting the whole thing on a purely “representative” basis, as you point out, the winner-take-all nature of most states would mean a Trump victory anyway, since Mr. Trump won 30 states and Ms. Clinton 20 + DC, giving him only a +18 value for the Senators. But I will make an even stronger assertion: even if the states were NOT winner take all, even if we apportioned EVs by Congressional district, Mr. Trump STILL would have won. How can we make this claim? Easy: the House is overwhelmingly Republican still (even with the slight reduction in their numbers). It’s very likely that there are more districts which elected Democratic Representatives, but voted for Mr. Trump than there are districts which did the opposite. It’s safe to say that Mr. Trump would have won the election by any measure applied, other than the overall vote totals.
While eliminating the two extra votes per state wouldn’t have flipped last years election, it would have flipped 2000 as that one was much closer Electorialy speaking. Heck, a stiff wind would have flipped that election.
Only if the stiff wind had blown off some hanging chads. 
This is the correct answer as to why it won’t happen.
I have always been sympathetic to the idea in the OP … but then I’m also a big fan of repealing the 17th Amendment, and letting state governments have a voice in Washington.