I was just reading an article about the electoral college and came across this:
I don’t understand the last sentence. I thought HoR seats are reapportioned after every census - so what creates a ceiling?
The Reapportionment Act of 1929 set the size of the House of Representatives at 435 with no method for automatic increases as had been the case in previous Reapportionment Acts.
Congress can change the number by passing new legislation if they want to, but they haven’t done so.
There is a hypothetical maximum Electoral Votes that one state could have.
Each state is guaranteed at least 3 EVs. Imagine a situation where 49 states and the District of Colombia each have a population of 1 person and all the rest of the people live in the 50th state. The 49 states and DC each get 3 EVs for a total of 150 EVs. The 50th state would get 388 EVs (538-150). That is the max.
Though the number of seats in Congress is limited to 535, there could theoretically be an increase in the number of overall Electoral Votes if population were distributed differently, even without admission of an additional state or change in law. If the population were distributed as evenly as practicable among the states then each state would get 2 Senators and 8 or 9 Representatives for a total of 10 or 11 Electoral Votes for each state. Under the 23rd Amendment the District of Colombia is entitled to the same number of Electoral Votes as the least populous state, so would get 10 Electoral Votes in that situation boosting the total number of Electoral votes from 538 to 545.
Duh, I guess I should have wondered why the number of reps hasn’t changed since I’ve been alive. Anyway, so states can gain or lose a number of reps as populations change, yes? Just not below 3?
Yes, exactly. Following each census the number of congressional seats allocated to each state is changed based on change in population. The only limit is no fewer than one. Therefore the floor for electoral votes is 3.
Also, yes, as laid out above, there’s a theoretical cap on how many congressional seats a state can have and therefore a cap on electoral votes. However, to treat that cap as anything other than theoretical is nonsense. California has 53 congressional seats now - therefore 55 electoral votes - but there’s nothing saying it couldn’t have 60 following the 2020 census. Or even 75 if things get really strange, growth-wise, over there.
Yes, this happens every census cycle. States gain and lose electoral seats and have to adjust their voting districts accordingly. But every state will always have at least two senators and one representative.
The number of Representatives can be as low as 1, the number of electors cannot go below 3.
DC is entitled to no more electors than the least populated state. So your hypothetical redistribution would not only need to equalize population among the states, but would also require a comparable population in DC. Which gets a little squirrelly because you can only cram so many people into 68 square miles. I suppose you could do it if all of DC looked like Manhattan.
If the number of representatives isn’t increased and the country’s population continues to rise – a pretty good bet – then the imbalance in representation between smaller states and larger states is just going to get worse. The best proposal I’ve seen so far is sort of a “double Wyoming rule,” whereby the smallest state gets two reps and the others get there fair multiplier (wrt to the Wyoming baseline) of seats, regardless of the final tally (I think this works out to a little over a thousand). If and when Dems regain the Senate, too, they could make this happen but so far they haven’t seemed particularly interested in big electoral reform, a constant disappointment to someone like me who wants them to be the Party of Progress instead of the Party of the Status Quo.
Currently four states have a lower population than the population of the US divided by 435: North Dakota, Alaska, Vermont, and Wyoming.
If instead the number of Representatives was based on a multiple of the population of the smallest state, Wyoming, with about 578,000, then the House would have 585 members. (That is, the population of Wyoming is about 1/585 of the total population of the US.)
DC is never going to look like that. There’s a legal limit to how high buildings can be in DC and it’s about 9 or 10 stories above ground. To get the same population density, they’d have to dig lots of deep subfloors.
I once read that the reason the HofR is limited to 435 members is that that’s how many actual seats there are in the chamber. Or rather, there’s 435 plus a few extra and those are taken by non-voting representatives from territories. Yes, they could change the arrangement and cram more seats into the chamber, but they don’t want to.
For kicks, I recalculated the 2016 election as if this was the case. My numbers were different than yours - I used the 2016 census numbers from here. It listed the population of Wyoming as 585,501 giving a total number of Reps of 547, total EC votes as 650.
Using those numbers, assuming the per-state vote went the same, Trump still beats Clinton in the Electoral College at 333 to 317. So for 2016 at least the extra 2 EC votes per state for Senators still means the results don’t match the popular vote totals.
So… we could greatly reduce the effect of the electoral college by simply amending the Reapportionment Act of 1929, right?
The two basic factors which make electoral votes disproportionate to population are #1 The population of the US (328 million) divided by 435 comes to about 754K but the least populated state (Wyoming) has only 574K, which means they get a whole vote instead of just a ¾ vote. #2 Each state gets two bonus votes for their two senate seats, so Wyoming gets 3 votes instead of just ¾. They get 3/538 (0.558%) of the vote, with only 1/571 (0.175%) of the population.
If we made one congressional district equal to the population of the least populous state, by my estimate there’d be 571 members of congress and Wyoming would get 3 votes out of 674 in the electoral college (0.445%). That’s closer. Make a congressional district equal to half the population of the least populous state, there’d by 1,143 members in congress and Wyoming would get 4 electoral votes out of 1,246 (0.321%). Make a congressional district equal to 1/8 the population of the least populous state, there’d by 4,571 members in congress and Wyoming would get 10 electoral votes out of 4674 (0.214%). For comparison, that’s still less than the 6,000 people it took to get a quorum in the Ecclesia in ancient Athens.
Put this together with some anti-gerrymandering legislation, and I think we could have a House of Representatives that more closely resembles the constituents. Suddenly it’s not such a big deal if one outlier slips through. A few insane people won’t make as much a difference if they are part of a group of several thousand.
Now, a larger House would make it more difficult to find office space for all of them. And the State of the Union speech might need a bigger auditorium.
muldoonthief, who would win the 2016 election with 1 congression district equal to 1/8 the population of the least populous state?
Yes, by far the most important factor in giving disproportionate weight to votes from states with small population are the two based on the Senate.
Or DC could just change the law. It has been seriously discussed in recent years as the population is increasing.
Ignore my previous results - I screwed up thanks to Maine splitting it’s vote, so I had some states R that actually went D, and vice-versa. The theoretical result would have been 370 Trump 280 Clinton. So nearly the same margin of victory by percentage of EVs as the actual 304-227 results.
I don’t think a rich nation of 325 million should let “the difficulty of finding office space” for maybe a couple of hundred legislators be the determining factor in this decision.
From the history desk:
Even after agreeing that representation is proportional to population and that every state gets at least one seat, apportioning seats is not a trivial problem. For example, suppose that states A, B, C have populations of 601k, 600k, 200k respectively.
If the House has 7 seats, it’s easy: 3-3-1
With 8 seats, 4-3-1, 9 seats 4-4-1, 10 seats 4-4-2. All pretty logical. In the 8-seat case, A gets an extra seat even though its population is only a tiny bit bigger than B, but what can you do?
However, what if Congress has set the size at 11 seats? 5-5-1 is the logical apportionment and is the allocation found by both the Hamilton and Jefferson algorithms. But this means the representation of State C falls from 2 seats to 1, when the size of Congress rises! This flaw is called the “Alabama Paradox.”
The Hamilton algorithm was passed by the first Congress but Washington vetoed it (his only 1st term veto). Congress then adopted the Jefferson algorithm which was used after the first six censuses. Both these schemes suffer from the Alabama Paradox (as we saw above) but that wasn’t a concern then, since the House size had not been preset.
The Jefferson arithmetic was known to be biased in favor of large states; J.Q. Adams proposed an alternative, biased for small states; Daniel Webster and mathematician James Dean each also provided a plan to a Congressional committee, but Congress plodded along with the Jefferson arithmetic, biased for large states. (Since small states have Senators, biasing the House for large states seems a good idea to me.)
But all this time, the House size was fixed after the census, or rather the “divisor” (the minimum district population) was set. After 1830, future-President Polk, handy with arithmetic and then Chairman of the House Apportionment Committee, set the divisor so that Georgia, Kentucky and New York would each get an extra seat. These were Jackson states; this ploy eventually helped Polk win the big job!
Congress saw what had happened too late, but after the 1840 census there was a flurry of consternation, Webster’s arithmetic was adopted, and the number of seats in the House decreased from 242 to 233.
To stop this partisan wrangling, legislation was passed before the 1850 census to keep the House fixed at 233 seats and adopt Hamilton’s algorithm — the arithmetic vetoed by Washington almost 60 years before. This may have solved the naked partisanship but arithmetic paradoxes like the “Alabama paradox” came to light. After the 1880 and 1890 censuses, Congress addressed this problem by hand-picking sizes for the House where the Hamilton and Webster algorithms produced the same result. After the 1900 census, a kluged Hamilton-Webster combined algorithm was used! Finally, after the 1910 census Congress fixed the House size at 433 and adopted Webster’s algorithm.
In the early 1920’s Congress was so partisan that no re-apportionment was done. The House allocation was still set based on the 1910 census. In 1929 Hoover called a special session of Congress, which fixed the House size at 435 and agreed to Webster’s algorithm. In 1940, Congress switched to a Huntington-Hill algorithm which has been used ever since. Mathematicians have since found a Balinski-Young algorithm which avoids some of the flaws of Huntington-Hill, but it seems Congress has had enough of all this arithmetic!
Isn’t it a federal law that DC buildings can’t be taller than the Capitol?
Thanks for providing this; I found it fascinating (NOT tldr !) If someone asks why Hamilton mattered, this is a really good reason. I find it gratifying that some in government tried to do the right thing (even if it was quite a while ago).