The Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929: yes or no?

Great Debates
101

If there were a large number of states that were well below the 1 vote threshold you may have a point, but there aren’t. In fact even Wyoming isn’t actually affected by the 1 rep minimum. If that rule was eliminated it would still get 1 representative just due to the rounding of 0.76 (how many it deserves) up to 1.

Using 2020 Census numbers from this table, there are 6 states that get 1 representative (ignoring DC and other territories that get a non-voting member). These states have a total population of 4,609,028 so they get a representation for every 768,171 people. California has a 52 representatives for a population of 39,538,223 so one vote per 760,350 people. So relative to California this collection of the least populated states is actually very slightly underrepresented.

ETA: Looking more carefully at the table, I think I may be comparing 2020 census numbers to 2010 apportionment so the actual totals may be slightly off, but the larger point still stands.

102

I think you’re hovering near how Single-Transferable-Vote works. It’s used in Ireland and Australia and it basically combines ranked choice with multi-member districts.

This is probably a separate discussion, but I think nearly any system that isn’t winner-take-all districts is generally superior to a system with winner-take-all, and even within winner-take-all FPTP is about as bad a system as you can get.

103

This is why people welcome dictatorships. No math.

104

California has fifty-three representatives not fifty-two. (Although they will be losing one in 2022.) That’s where I got the figure of 747,400.

I don’t see a point in figuring out the average district size for six states. It seems like an attempt to blur the statistics.

As I wrote, 747,000 people in California get a representative and 569,000 people in Wyoming get a representative. Is there a reason why that is a good idea?

You can’t just isolate one state’s representation from what other states have. Wyoming currently has one representative in a House with 435 members. Suppose we decided to give California a hundred additional members with no change in Wyoming’s representation. They had one before and they have one after; would you say their representation is the same? I would say no; one representative in a group of 535 is less than one representative in a group of 435.

This is why I feel we should have a system where each district has as close to the same number of people as is practical.

105

Can you flesh this out for me? At large districts have been eliminated largely because of their anti-democratic character. If TX had at large districts it is likely that it wouldn’t have a single Democrat in Congress. With districts, the localities at least get a Democratic representative.

What is the top 5% in your proposal? Votes? Candidates?

As far as third parties, I don’t see the need for that representation. Our system has worked for over two hundred years by having two big tent parties that act within the Overton Window of contemporary politics. We don’t need a Nazi or Communist Party as neither of those things are within the realm of possibility or desirability.

106

That is exactly what you are doing, you are concentrating on Wyoming’s representation in isolation. Recall your original statement.

Every state is guaranteed a representative; this means all low population states will get one. So any losses caused by a cap have to come from higher population states.

I have demonstrated that it isn’t all the small states that are the winners and large states that are the losers. The small states have both winners and losers. Looking at the column I should have noticed before writing my comment, Wyoming is somewhat of a winner at 577K per seat, but Delaware is a loser at about 1 million per seat. The real winner as it turns out it Montana at 542K but with 2 reps it couldn’t have been helped by the cap.

If you use the Wyoming minimum delegate , it will forcibly rightsize Wyoming, but new deviations both in the positive and negative direction will pop up in other states, and they aren’t going to be significantly smaller than what we have in under the current system.

107

The problem with this idea is it is a lot easier to get 30k votes downtown then it is in East bumfuck. The people in East bumfuck deserve a representative who will care about their local issues.

To take an issue we’re having here in Colorado. The Denver metro area voted to approve repopulating wolves into the rural eastern part of the state the locals in the eastern part of the state rejected the issue handily but since it was a state wide initiative it passed. Forcing congress to also be a state wide election will cause the rural parts of the state to be ignored.

108

That depends on how the election system works. It could actually increase the chances that rural Coloradans have a representative who depends on their votes. Colorado is already one of the more urban states, and it’s growing in such a way that the rural share of the population is sure to decline quite a bit more. It may be that the best way for it to retain some rural-focused representation is for it to allow all of the disparate rural areas across the state to band together to get someone over the line.

109

And yet, that single candidate who is canvassing the 80% of the state that is rural will have to spend more money, time and energy then a similar candidate walking through downtown Denver.

Roughly, 85% of Colorado’s population lives in the urban corridor along I-25. If we went with the Wyoming rule the rest of the state outside of the corridor would get 1 representative and that would be assuming someone who lives on the Kanasas border has the same local issues as someone in the four corners, though the rep would probably be the only republican in the state. If instead we did a state wide election those 10 reps would each need to receive ~ 250k votes (assuming 50% split for R/D and 85% of registered voters voting) that means that to get elected you would need 25% of the rural vote vs 5% of the urban vote. It is a huge burden on a candidate that wants to represent even the non related (geographically) interests of various rural people.

110

I don’t think this could possibly be the case. Are you saying that the democrats couldn’t muster even 3% of the vote?

What I see as undemocratic is gerrymandering. No one has come up with a solution to this, and it makes sense, as long as politicians are able to choose the voters, rather than the other way around, they will never give up that power.

I also point out that this would be along with vastly expanding the house, making one rep per 30,000 residents.

I said votes, so… votes. Not sure what your question is here.

I see that as your opinion, one that I don’t share. Third parties deserve proportionate representation to the number of people that support them.

I wouldn’t say that it has worked well. Pretty much all the flaws and gridlock that come from our govt is because of that two party system. The founders didn’t want it, even though they set up a system that pretty much guaranteed it would come about.

Those aren’t the only third parties out there. But I say, why not? If there are enough people that support a position, then it should get representation. I may not like that position, but then, I don’t like the positions taken by one of the majority parties that are out there right now.

You may not desire it, but that’s why democracy is better than just doing what you want to do. What happens when something that you support is found “undesirable”?

I mean, sure. That’s because there are more people that live in downtown than in East bumfuck. I’m not sure that I agree this is a bug here.

If you have to resort to undemocratic means in order to force minority rule in order to get your way, then you have abandoned democracy altogether.

I don’t see why the ruralites would not be able to must together enough votes to make their voices heard. Sure, they may be outnumbered by the people who have more support, but I don’t really see that as the problem that you seem to.

And there are plenty of cases where the rural areas have overruled the wishes of a municipality in how to conduct their business within that municipality.

Basically, it’s not a balance that you are looking for, it’s an imbalance in the favor of people who live in sparsely populated areas.

That’s assuming of course, that no one knows how to use the internet.

A few things here. First, overvoting would work in the minorities favor. If your urban based politician gets 400K votes, then that makes a lower floor required for the others.

Second, I don’t know that I would propose this with the number of reps that we currently have, but rather, going back to the 1 per 30,000. That completely changes your numbers. You may only need to get 10k votes to get a seat. Maybe even less.

And that would be why it’s useful. Rather than trying to get several areas that have different interests to rally behind one candidate, you can pick one that best represents your interests, and they would have a much better chance of getting elected.

In my opinion, any argument that is against change because rural areas will no longer have the ability to rule from a minority is simply an argument against the basic idea of democracy.

111

Straight populist rule doesn’t work. Geography matters. LA stealing the water from the rural Easter Sierra would have been just fine in a straight populist democracy because more people needed that water in LA so screw that low population area. Even outside of a red blue divide that is wrong. If the 10 most populist states decided to dump all of nuclear waste in Wyoming because no one who matter lived there that would be wrong despite being very populist the people who are effected directly should have a say and possibly a greater say then people who aren’t effected.

Now if we did get down to the 30k per representative level we would have 195 from Colorado and you would average ~12,750 votes per winner. You are probably correct that you could get 21.6% of La Plata County to vote for a single candidate but it’s also possible that Denver County could get 59 reps elected since they only need 1.7% to vote for a particular candidate. With a little coordination by a political party you could easily have all 195 from the metro area.

It would be much easier to let a computer draft the lines for 30k population districts that are as compact as possible. Then the high population areas would be rightly overrepresented but the rural people would be able to have their concerns heard and be brought up in session even if they were then ignored

112

No, I certainly have not and would not have done that. It’s the opposite of what I’ve been saying throughout this thread and in other threads on similar topics.

Because it is so clearly wrong. In any voting situation, you can’t just consider how many votes one entity has. What matters is what percentage of the votes it has. And the only way you can determine a percentage is by considering the total.

Again, I disagree. It’s a matter of math. If your goal is to create equal representation, then the more representatives you get, the closer you will approach that goal. It’s the granularity that’s been discussed in this thread.

113

Not sure I follow. Geography doesn’t vote, people do. If the problem is that the people in the Eastern Sierra want to have several times the amount of water per person than a person in LA has, then that is Eastern Sierra trying to screw the high population area. Still seeing your points as simply trying to harm the majority for the convivence of the minority.

If they were to do that, it wouldn’t be because no one who mattered lived there, it would be because not that many people live there so there would be plenty of space to put in a nuclear waste facility, far from anyone at all.

I have no idea how you managed that math. If it is 30,000 per resident, then it would be an average of 30,000 residents per candidate. The difference between that and the number of voters would simply be the percentage of residents that are voters.

Keep in mind, that just as you currently only vote for one rep, you still would only be voting for one rep. You would not be voting for all 195. Maybe that’s what you are thinking? That’s the only way that your math and objections work at all.

And you are basically guaranteed to only have two parties represented.

An at large vote allows me to vote for someone who represents all of my diverse interests and positions, rather than choose which one of two is closer. When a major complaint about politics is the amount of polarization, I see this as entirely a good thing.

When people say, “They’re both the same”, well give them more choices.

114

Man, I’m seeing ideas floated in here that no serious election reformers are advocating or that any other modern democracy is using.

People who study this for a living generally agree that to improve representation in the House we should:

A. Expand the size of it, and
B. Employ multi-member districts (when the number of reps in a state is three or more) with some form of transferable voting.

That’s it. That’s the list. Doing those two things will result in a House that reflects the country’s political preferences, make most state delegations as representative as possible and eliminate the gerrymandering bullshit.

115

And most of the time, when experts are talking about an expansion, they’re talking about adding a couple hundred, not 10,000 or whatever some people are smoking. Legislative bodies around the world seem to be very reluctant to go much above 600-700 members, regardless of the number of people they represent. Having thousands of members would require a pretty radical redefinition of what a legislator does. (The Chinese legislature has nearly three thousand members but it only meets as a full body for a couple of weeks each year, and for the rest of the year it delegates its authority to a much more normally-sized body. And it’s mostly a rubberstamp, of course.)

116

Not harm but ensure we don’t have a tyrany of the majority situation. That is the inherent danger of straight democracy. Being a minority relies on the benevolence of the majority to not enslave you or steal from you or turn your home into their dump.

I guess the world you envission is radically different than the one we currently inhabit. Even in an at large district there will be many more candidates than positions. For my mangled math I assumed twice as many candidates since split votes roughly in half currently. If you added in third party candidates you would have ~400 candidates running the number of votes would only break 30k for the most popular and then to compensate for that you would have candidates getting elected with possibly tens of votes. Which, come to think of it, is probably what you’ve been envisioning when you talk about allowing minor candidates to be elected. I still think you’re more likely to end up with those 10s of voters candidates to represent the 4th street pimps than a mountain community but I think I’ve figured out where you’re coming from.

117

I remember seeing a study indicating that national legislatures around the world averaged something in proximity to the cube root of the country’s population. Using that as a baseline would give us a House with about 691 representatives.

118

What were the founders smoking when they put that provision in the constitution, do you think? Were they going for a number they wanted to have in congress, or were they going for a number that they felt could adequately represent their constituents? They could have decreed that there shall be x representatives, but they didn’t.

Good, as what they do right now is spend most of their time trying to get campaign donations. If they are only representing 30,000, rather than 750,000 people, then they can instead spend their time reaching out directly to voters, rather than to wealthy campaign donors.

That seems a pretty reasonable system to me.

That’s the problem with democracy sure. But the alternative is a tyranny of the minority, where the majority relies on the benevolence of the minority to not enslave you or steal from you or turn your home into their dump.

I think it would be a bit more than 10’s of votes, but a couple thousand, maybe a few hundred, sure.

I mean, if a mountain community can’t muster a few tens of votes, then I’m not sure it should have representation.

119

OK, I think we are very close to the same page now. It seems you have accepted the main point that I was arguing against, namely that it was a problem of small states being the winners and big states being the losers, and instead a problem of small states generally having a large random deviation from the optimal proportional representation while large states adhere more strongly to that ratio.

And yes I agree that increasing the house size will reduce that variability. When I said it won’t “significantly” change, I was referring specifically to using the Wyoming rule, which would only increase the house size by only about 36%. That will just more or less randomly shift who the winners or losers are, but won’t have a very large effect on how far off those winners and losers are from the optimal average.

You can reduce the variability by adding representatives but you are going to have to increase the size of the house by several multiples. Suppose you double the size of the house of Representatives, so lets say the number of representatives each state gets is the rounded version of its 2020 population divided by 378K. Now Wyoming deserves to have 1.52 representatives which gets rounded up to 2. So Wyoming’s representation doubles along with the rest of the country and its over representation in the house remains unchanged.

So it really comes down to how large a deviation are you willing to accept vs how large a house are you willing to accept. I can fully understand the visceral attraction of 1 man one vote and any deviation from that is undemocratic. But I am more concerned about the practical effect on legislation. And so long as the winners and losers are randomly distributed it is highly unlikely that there will be a piece of legislation where the all of the over represented states are on one side and all of the underrepresented states are on the other (the sole exception probably being how large to make the house of representatives). If the US had a rotten borough problem where there were several states that all had under 100,000 people but still had a full representation then I would agree that corrective measure were necessary. But if its just roundoff error I don’t see expanding the house to over a thousand members, all of whom are fighting with each other for for camera time, is worth reducing over/under representation from around 1.3 to around 1.1. You may disagree but at that point its just a personal preference, and we’ll have to agree to disagree.

120

I have repeatedly said that I feel our guiding principle should be as equal a representation as practical. And I understand that the smaller the groups the more equal the resulting representation will be. So, in theory, I guess I should sign on with the 30,000 system.

But I feel that this probably crosses over into impracticality. I feel a legislative body with eleven thousand members is not going to function well.

I will say I’m not declaring certainty on this issue. I’m open to arguments that a group of that size could work.