Which makes much of Washington gorgeously uniform, reminiscent of Paris.
Making building height proportional to street width was a common device in the early 20th century. People were concerned that the new-fangled skyscrapers were cutting off the sun to streets, leaving them in perpetual shadows. New York got around this with a zoning ordinance that forced buildings to take up smaller percentages of lots as they rose higher, leading to the stepped-back shape of the Chrysler and Empire State buildings.
Philadelphia was the one that actually had this kind of height limitation. For much of the century no building could stand taller than the statue of William Penn on City Hall. It wasn’t formal law, though, just frowned upon fiercely.
I expect that most of the folks involved were trying to do the right thing. It’s just that this is one of those cases where it’s not entirely clear just what “the right thing” is.
Personally, I’d like to have a Constitutional maximum House. Divide the census’ population of each state by 30,000 and give it the largest whole number of seats less than or equal to that ratio. Very simple algorithm. But I realize that number of representatives is impractically large.
Instead, I think giving the least populous state one more Representative than Senator would be best. And then work out the rest from there. The House is supposed to be more local, so even low-pop states need multiple Representatives.
And making this change shouldn’t be partisan, since every voter wants a more local Representative.
You think 10,000 Reps might be too many? “The gentlewoman’s time has expired. The Member from Northwest Cupertino has twenty seconds. Would you like a page to bring you a microphone, sir?”
And suppose two small states had 90,000 and 59,000 population respectively. The larger state would get three seats; the state that’s only a third smaller would get only a single seat. (This is the Jefferson algorithm with fixed divisor.)
As I pointed out in post #13, the Ecclesia in ancient Athens had approximately that number. There was no set number, but the required minimum for a quorum was 6,000. It has been done.
So I ran the numbers again, with the base population per Rep being 1/8 of WY’s population. This leads to a House of Representatives with 4409 members, and a total of 4519 EVs, with DC getting 10, the same as Wyoming. With those numbers, Trump wins the EC, 2560 to 1959. Interestingly, that’s still about 56% of the EC, the same as the actual case and my first test.
So for the next step, I went back to each states getting 1 Rep per multiple of smallest state population (rounded so you need to exceed half the WY population to get the next Rep), and stripped out the EVs per Senator completely - you only get as many EVs as number of Representatives. So WY and other small states get 1 EV, California gets 67 EVs. Using these numbers, there are 548 EVs, and Trump wins, 310-238, again with 56% of the Electoral College.
If I go back to the actual mechanism - 435 Reps, 538 EVs, and strip away all the EVs due to Senators, the results become Trump: 244 EV, Clinton 185 EV. (There were 7 faithless electors who voted “other”, I’m leaving them alone), Trump wins with 55% of the EC.
So even stripping away the advantage smaller states have due to the Senator-based EVs, Trump still wins. It looks like the winner-take-all mechanism used by all but 2 states is what actually gave him the victory in opposition to the popular vote results. Looking at the 5 biggest states won by each candidate and the % of the votes they won:
California - Clinton 61.73%, Trump 31.62%
New York - Clinton 59.01% Trump 36.52%
Illinois - Clinton 55.83% Trump 38.76%
New Jersey - Clinton 54.99% Trump 41.00%
Virginia - Clinton 49.73% Trump 44.41%
Texas - Trump 52.23% Clinton 43.24%
Florida - Trump 49.02% Clinton 47.82%
Pennsylvania - Trump 48.18% Clinton 47.46%
Ohio - Trump 51.69% Clinton 43.56%
Michigan - Trump 47.50% Clinton 47.27%
So while Clinton’s big state victories were pretty commanding, Trump’s margins were significantly smaller, with 3 under 2%. With Winner Take all, none of that matters. There’s a “natural” gerrymandering going on, where big Democratic states are heavily Democratic, but but Republican states (after Texas) are more evenly balanced.
Note: I’ve double checked anything, but by no means guarantee a mistake hasn’t crept in.
Back in the 1960s, there was an article by (I think) John Banzhaf that argued that (largely because of the winner-take-all nature of most states) the individual voter in a large state had disproportionate voting power compared to voters in small states – as many as three “votes” (somewhat contrary to the oft-repeated view that the EC gives disproportionate voting power to residents of small states). I don’t know if I ever understood the math well enough to know how well that argument held up.
I imagine some sort of electronic forum where every Rep could post and vote. Physically speaking is so last millennium.
When was the last time a state had less than 100,000 people? Poking around Alaska state population it looks like Alaska in 1940. This is not going to be a problem for the foreseeable future.
I don’t think that people understand the Electoral College problem. Many of you seem to be thinking that it’s a representation issue (Old Wyoming gets too many votes. Blasted Wyoming.) The problem certainly has something to do with apportionment, but it’s really about winner-take-all electoral voting practices. What this does is make the votes of people in states with large majorities of one party worth less. Let’s pretend that we have two states. California and Texas and for the sake of argument, they both have exactly 1 million residents and they both have an equal number of Electoral College Votes - 12 a piece. Let’s say that California is true blue and 700 thousand of its residents vote for Blue and 300 thousand for Red. Texas though is more wishy washy. Maybe 550 thousand vote for Red and 450 thousand vote for blue. The popular vote is pretty clearly in blue’s favor - 1.15 million for blue and 850 thousand for red. They both end up with exactly the same number of electoral votes.
Reapportionment won’t help that problem at all. Any type of proportional representation as long as the state is ‘winner-take-all’ is going to run into those issues. You can have your 10 thousand representatives and as long as states are winner take all, you can still have mismatches in the popular vote as long as some states are overwhelmingly in favor of one candidate while others are not. There is no federal fix because states are who determines how their electors are selected. You can try to banish the Electoral College, but winner take all benefits states just as often as it hurts them. Does a true blue state like California really want to worry about a resurgent red? Right now, it knows pretty strongly where its votes are going. If you start to talk about popular vote, Republicans are going to try and put those Californian voters on the edge into their cross hairs. That can start mucking with state politics as well and no one wants that.
Nope. It gets the same number of Electoral Votes as if it were a state as long as it does not not exceed the EVs of the least populous state. So in your scenario if DC were to get one Representative based on population they would only get 3 EVs.
That example I was referring to was with population equally spread among the states and DC. If the least populous state gets 10 EVs and DC has the same population as that state then DC also gets 10 EVs.
We have two states that currently split their electoral vote - Maine and Nebraska. But they don’t do it the way I think you are assuming. They don’t proportionally split the whole pile based on overall vote. Both of those states award an electoral vote to the winner in each congressional district, and then gives the remaining two electoral votes to the overall winner. In general, that splits the electoral votes between the two major party candidates, but won’t usually assign any to distant third party candidates. It also still biases to the overall winner. Nevertheless, if all states did this, it would make the electoral college come out closer to the popular vote.
If we want to push for a reform in the way we tally votes in elections, encouraging the adoption of ranked choice voting is probably one of the better suggestions. That DOES encourage independent and third party candidates, and allows people to vote for them without feeling that they are wasting their vote. You also eliminate the “spoiler” problem - you don’t elect candidate A who garners 40% of the vote because B and C split the remaining 60% and most of those voters would have preferred either B or C over A.
In general, it usually doesn’t split them at all. Maine split in 2016, and Nebraska split in 2008, but usually, they all end up going to the same party.
I was going to mention that, and point out that those are both small states with few electoral votes in the first place - 5 for Nebraska and 4 for Maine, leaving only 3 and 2 votes to be split. For a large state like California or Texas, you would expect it to be the rule rather than the exception that the vote would split. Unlikely that every one of CA’s 55 congressional districts would vote the same way - some of those districts are decidedly red, even in an overwhelmingly blue state.
According to this data set, the population per representative for Montana is the worst at almost 1million to 1. California and Texas come in at 31 & 32 at around 705k which is less than the national average of 710k. Wisconsin, Tennesee, and Arizona are the closest to being average. At 527k/rep, Rhode Island’s two districts get the most house representation for their population.
Yeah, you’d expect the extreme cases to be the largest state with 1 and the smallest state with 2-- That’s the sort of “edge effect” that comes up naturally with any integer-division-based scheme like this. Though that’s only looking at representation in the House: Montana still has a lot more senators and electors per capita than most states.