US House - more seats - representation and elections

Great Debates
1

US House of Reps - how would adding more seats affect representation and elections?

Ground rules: I know gerrymandering is a huge problem, lets ignore it for this thread. Thanks!

As I have mentioned in another thread, I think it might be a good idea to increase the number of reps in the house, for a few reasons. I think it would make it more expensive to “buy” enough reps to push legislation through congress, it would make my congressperson more accessible to me, and it would give me (a Californian) more equal vote value with someone in WY, both in the house and in the electoral college.

There are any number of ways that the lower voter to rep ratio could be done, the simplest would be to give each state a rep for every X people, with simple 4/5 rounding and a minimum of one per state. The current system uses an iterative algorithm that is hard to summarize, and any system that is not a straight 1 rep per x people is going to involve some odd algorithm like this.

In my other thread I explored how more members would effect the internal workings of the house. Now I would like to look at how having more members might affect the actual power I, a random individual, have to influence my government, and how the increase in the number of house seats could affect their elections and other elections.

More reps = more access to my rep. But that also means my rep has less power.

For reasons I don’t understand and/or disagree with, land and specific kinds of boundaries give the inhabitants more or less voting power. With the current allocation of reps, there is an uneven number of voters per rep, and I happen to get the short end of the stick there. In addition when it comes to electing president, the large population territories get shafted, again. In the end, my presidential vote is worth about 1/3 of a voter in Wyoming (ignoring the red-blue-swing state thing).

What unintended consequences would there be because of a significant expansion of the house (not including issues related to gerrymandering or the logistics of the larger legislative body)? Lets set 800 seats (about double current), up to 3500 (the number we would get with 100K people per rep) as the reasonable range to discuss.

Would too many reps make people less able to understand and influence the government? What else is wrong with this idea?

Thanks!

2

The short answer is no change unless the law/Constitution is rewritten to allow for at-large elections thus allowing states to have proportional representation.

3

Here’s a proposal.

Have a number X. X represents the number of people that entitle a state to a representative in the House. Each multiple of X is another representative. You round off the state’s population to the nearest multiple of X and that’s the number of representatives they have. So .5X to 1.5X equals one representative; 1.5X to 2.5X equals two representatives; 2.5X to 3.5X equals three representatives; and so on.

And here’s the key factor: we set X with every census at the population of the least populous state.

The advantage of this system is that it expands as population expands. In the 1790 census, Rhode Island had a population of only 68,825. If that amount of people was the basis of representation today, we’d have over 4700 representatives in the House. But under my system, X would have been fixed at 563,626 (Wyoming’s population) in 2010 and we’d have 548 representatives.

4

You beet me to it!

Gerrymandering and proportional representation

5

This is a simple algorithm: 1 rep per x people, with X set by the smallest state. It results in a smaller house than my arbitrary 100K/rep, and is based on a reasonable number to use.

This would give CA about 66 reps, and 68 EC votes. WY would get 1 and 3. By definition this would be setting the same number of seats per rep for everyone, subject to rounding, but the Electoral college votes are still a little uneven.

Current
State . . . . . Reps . . . . voters per each EC vote
CA . . . . . . . 55 . . . . . 1/680K people
WY . . . . . . .3 . . . . . . .1/190k people

Nemo method:
CA . . . . . . .68 . . . . . . 1/550K people
WY . . . . . . .3 . . . . . . .1/190k people

My 100k/rep method would give us
CA . . . . . . 375 . . . . . .1/100K people
WY . . . . . . 8 . . . . . . . 1/71K people

From the perspective of evening out my EC vote, the Nemo system is better than current, not as good as the Dag method.

Thanks!

My source

6

The number of representatives did increase throughout the 19th century and up until 1913, and then in 1929 legally fixed at 435 (though '59 and '61 had more, not sure why).
Obviously that was mostly due to adding new states, but it also had the effect of 1 rep per 60k people in 1789 to 1 per 233k in 1913. We are now up to one rep per about 733k people.

I have mixed feelings on the issue. I agree that each rep should represent about the same number of people as every other. Mainly for the equalizing the vote/power of each rep in the house and in the electoral college. And I think it’s worth doing for this reason alone.

The only problem is that the size of the house would explode. If we kept the same ratio as in 1913 then the number of reps would be over 1400. The “Dag” method would give over 3000. I don’t know how well legislative bodies of that size could function.

7

I’m all for increasing the number of representatives, to the point that I could actually expect to have a personal relationship with my congressperson.