What would a completely NON-gerrymandered House of Representatives look like?

Factual Questions
1

Imagine if we were to draw up a House on the principles of near-total objective fairness, as close as we can. How would we do it?

Feel free to suggest appointing people as non-partisan as we could to be in charge of re-districting, or to finding how states could be apportioned equally, etc.

The first principle I’m thinking of (tell me if you disagree) is you would start with finding the state with the fewest people in it–let’s say that’s Wyoming. So Wyoming’s population = 1 representative. If the next least populous state is let’s say North Dakota which has over 150% of Wyoming’s population, then North Dakota gets 2 Reps, and so on. If California has 30.4 times Wyoming’s population, then it gets 30 Reps, but if it has 30.6 times Wyoming then it gets 31 Reps, etc. (Numbers pulled out of my ass, for illustrative purposes.)

Next, the non-partisan commission in charge of dividing a state into however many districts it has starts from each of the states’ corners, if it has corners, and eats away at the state, drawing up the squarest districts as we move towards the states’ centers. With square states like Colorado, such a thing is easy to visualize, but I’m sure that general principle can be applied in a non-partisan manner to irregular states like Hawaii and New Jersey.

Propose ways of redistricting that are your own, or have been proposed by experts in the field, or show me what’s wrong with my ideas, just keep this as objective and as factual as you can.

MODS–if this seems more IMHO or P&E, then move it as you deem best. But I am interested in factual responses more than I am in personal opinions or political positions.

2

Start by defining “fairness”. If you just want each rep to represent as nearly equal a number of citizens as possible, that’s easy enough. As you suggest.

If you also want districts to be compact, SES homogenous, SES diverse, ethnically homogenous, ethnically diverse, or strong majority for one or another party, or evenly divided by party you get different answers. And cogent arguments can be made for each of those parameters being an element of what “fairness” means.


A different approach is to forget the idea of house districts all together. The e.g. 1 rep from WY represents every citizen in WY. The e.g. 31 reps for CA each represent the entire state of CA.

3

538 Did this project back in 2018. Shows you the breakdown based on different ways of drawing boundaries:

4

Or a mixture of large divisions coupled with various forms of proportional representation or ranked choice. For example, California might be divided into 6 large regional districts, 5 with 5 members and 1 with 6 members. The voters in those districts could vote for those reps, using PR or ranked choice.

5

The division among the states is fair and has been from the beginning. There are a few questions at the boundary, but once a formula is agreed on it is applied.

First the population is divided by 435 to get a quota. Then any state with fewer than quota population is given one rep and then removed from the stats and the quota is recalculated. Then each state is given the number of reps equal to the whole part of its quota. This will take care of nearly all the reps, but there will inevitably be some left over. There have been a number of formulas devised over what to do with them, none entirely satisfactory and I don’t want to get into the weeds over them. Suffice it to say that the current method is non-partisan and agreed to by all.

Then you get into redistricting the state. That is where the highly partisan gerrymandering comes in. Some mathematicians have devised a computerized method that produces congressional districts that are compact, connected without weird shapes. I don’t know if any state uses it, but certainly many don’t. Some states use independent commissions. Some are required by the state constitution to do so. In some cases the state legislature can, and sometimes does, overrule the commission.

In the 2022 election the eventual partisan split in the House, actually closely mirrored the vote. Slightly more than half the voters voted for a Republican congressman and slightly more than half the reps are Republican. The partisan gerrymanders canceled out. That is not how it always works. In fact, I don’t think that’s how it usually works.

6

The current method of apportioning reps to states is highly partisan in effect. It may be neutral in its terms, but not in the results of those terms.

The deep-seated cause is that 435 is far to granular a measure to allocate even remotely evenly between states whose populations differ by a factor of up to 68. If we had 4500 reps we could get a lot closer.

7

Did you mean “far too coarse” or “not granular enough”?

8

D’oh. Thank you. You’re correct.

435 is few in number - too course per rep and leads to ridiculous overweighting of the unpopulated rural R-leaning states and ridiculous underweighting of the large urban D-leaning states. If there were e.g. 4500 reps, we could “make change” using smaller units and more tightly fit the state delegation size to the state populace.

I switched the direction of the sentence in mid-thought, but did a shitty job of fixing all of it, rather than just most of it.

9

While I can’t speak to the second part of your hypothetical, the first breaks down like this:

So California would have 67 reps instead of the current 52. And Wyoming would have

Increasing the base number of reps to improve the granularity doesn’t change things too much:

10

The problem is that districting with first-past-the-post means you still have a system biased to the D&R hedgemony. I would say look at each state’s party breakdown by party and assume true proportional representation.

11

Presumably non-gerrymandered logic would try to include all people of a common (geographical) community together -geographic and other considerations. It would make sense, for example, to group all the people in, say, the big cities into their own district if the city is big enough, and all the rural people around into another district - as each of those districts would have different issues they would want their congresscritter to speak out on. Where it gets confusing is when there are not enough people to create these logical districts.

The point of congress was for the individual members to bring forward the concerns of their local community. Electing a group of members from a list has the same issue as proportional representation in parliamentary countries - instead of campaigning in an area among the local population, this favours members who suck up to the local party brass to improve their position on the list - and the party’s standing is mostly affected by a charismatic leader or a focus on issues. Be prepared for an abortion party, an NRA party, a unionization party, reparations party, etc. each hoping to get their at least one or two reps into congress, where as the swing vote (i.e. for speaker, or a particular pork bill) they can force the speaker to cater to their whims. Good thing that doesn’t happen with a 2-party system today, does it?

12

I should add that proportion by state makes sense in terms of the elctoral college, since the goal is to allocate the entire country vote in proportion to how the vote went. the elctoral college gives an implicit bias to the smaller states, but then the smaller states have the granularity/Coarseness problem also. The the problem becomes, if a state votes 55-45 for a candidate, how many of 3, 4, 5, or 6 electoral votes should each candidate get? (My fairness instinct say 2-1, 2-2, 3-2, 3-3) What’s the allocation criteria?

13

I agree that the formula is likely fair, for the two parameters which have been set, one by the Constitution and one by Congress. However, those two parameters arguably do not lead to a fair result, even if the formula is as good as it can be.

The Constitutional parameter is that every state gets at least one Representative, regardless of its population. That can’t be changed, short of a constitutional amendment.

The Congressional parameter is that there’s an upper limit on the size of the House: 435 seats, regardless of population shifts. That could be changed, if the stars aligned correctly in Congress.

The combination of those two parameters means that individuals in smaller states have greater voting power than individuals in large states.

For instance, Wyoming is the smallest state by population: 576,851 people (using numbers from Wikipedia). It has one seat. That gives a ratio of 1 seat per 576,851 Wyoming resident.

California is the largest state by population: 38,940,231. It has 52 seats. That’s one seat per 748,851 Californians.

That means that Californians are under-represented in the House, compared to smaller states like Wyoming and the Dakotas.

The concept of using the smallest state as the seat ratio does away with the fixed cap of 435 seats in the House, and instead accepts that the House will increase as the population increases.

Using the Wyoming ratio of 1 seat per 576,851 residents, and applying it to the total US population of 333,287,557, you get approximately 572 seats in the House.

Applying that same Wyoming ratio to California’s population, you get approximately 67 seats for California (probably wouldn’t be exactly that, because of the 50 seats per state regardless of population would skew the distribution, but close enough for discussion purposes).

But wait, there’s more! The overrepresenation of the small states in the Representatives also means that they are over-represented in the electoral college. Getting rid of the 435 cap and using the smallest-state ratio would smooth out that over-representation as well.

It’s also arguable that using the smallest-state ratio is closest to the original conception of the allocation of the House seats. The Connecticut compromise was that all the states would have equal representation in the Senate, but seats in the House according to population. The effect of the 435 seat cap is to undercut that clear allocation of seats between the two houses, and give the smaller states greater representation.

And, going back to a no-cap on the House would be restoring the pattern that was used up to the census of 1920. Up to then, when the population increased, the number of seats increased. Until 1920, when for the first time ever, the folks in the cities outnumbered the folks in the country. That would mean more seats for the bigger citified states, and no growth for the salt-of-the-earth folks in the smaller states Can’t have that. There was no redistribution that year, and the 1920 number of 435 has been kept ever since.

14

There are a number of proposals for creating “fair” districts. Of course, each has their upsides and downsides. I am not aware of anywhere in the US where any of these are used. Neither party wants any part of “fair districts.”

15

That’s kind of contradictory - California outdoes North Dakota 1 seat 775K pop., or South Dakota 1 seat, 895K pop, Delaware 1 seat 1M pop. But not RI 2 seats 1.1M

Granulairy/coarsness means there’s no pleasing some smaller states - you win some, you lose some. However, in the biggers states like Texas, 776K per seat, or NY 762K/seat, it’s fairly consistent with California.

Of course, there’s an implicit bias with the Electoral College for smaller states when you add 2 seantors to each state, but that bias was built into the constitution in the 1780’s.

16

First past the post districts will always be “unfair”, every district will include people who didn’t vote for their rep, and probably people who hate the rep and think the rep is acting against their interests.

If we want fair representation, we’d do better to have statewide (or hell, countywide, but that would require changing the constitution) ranked choice voting, with non-private votes. If a state has k representatives, anyone with more than 1/k first place votes gets the first 1/k people as their constituents, and then some of those voters don’t get that person, and instead their second choice vote gets counted, then more reps reach the threshold, and so on.

If you counted all the votes and some voters weren’t matched to reps, a “run off” (which would have to feature new candidates) would ensue, until all the spots were taken by voters who ranked that candidate somewhere in their ballot.

Everyone would be represented by someone they voted for, even if not by their favorite candidate.

The small states might have to run moderates. But they’d be people who represented their voters. Big states could support a few crazy extremists, but only a few, in each side, and moderates would be likely to mop up a lot of slots there, too.

Not that anything like this can happen. It breaks too many rules in the US. And it would have been unthinkable in the days when letters were slow and travels slower, how could you even meet a candidate from across your state? But today, with zoom gathering and fast travel, it could completely work in terms of voters getting to know candidates and having access to those candidates so they could be represented.

17

I’m going to bang my pie-in-the-sky drum again and say that the “problem” with this, and the Electoral College mess, is IMHO that we accept the current State configuration as immutable. The formation of the States and their shapes, sizes, and boundries, are accidents of history, politics, and geography. Why are Rhode Island and Delaware tiny, whereas Wyoming is large? And consequently, why are Congressional Districts limited to State boundries? All of these limits are just accepted as “the way things are and should be until the end of time”.

I disagree.

Yes, yes, I know there is no political will to discuss these aspects, but a boy can dream!

18

I’m not sure this is true. The main effect of the 435 cap is that it gives a representative even to those states whose population is lower than the quota that you get by dividing the overall population of the US by 435. That current quota is about 760,000, and there are only three states smaller than this: Wyoming, Vermont and Alaska. Two of these states are Republican-leaning, one is Democrat-leaning. Sounds pretty balanced.

Of course, even for the other states, there will always be rounding inaccuracies coming from acing to distribute 435 seats among states with a population of more than 330 million. But for those states whose population is above the quota (i.e., the other 47), these rounding inaccuracies do not systematically favour the small states over the big ones. They’re determined by the <1 fraction of a seat that the state is short of getting another full seat.

19

But the bottom 3 states gain by this - Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska - and the next 3 lose by this - the Dakotas and Delaware. Luck of the draw. There will always be rounding errors.

I recall a discussion about California splitting into two or more states, as a means to improve their representation (senators, at least). More realistically, Puerto Rico and DC have been mentioned as state candidates, an no doubt if/when the Dems control both houses it may come to a vote?

Canada has about 300 representatives in parliament for 1/10 the population as the USA, and Britain has over 600 for 1/5 the population. the only benefit to a larger number is a knife-edge bare majority is less likely, and even so, a few individuals are less important in the total, and so less likely to get results by being obstructive. The biggest problem in British parliament is the ruling majority keeping a reign on its difficult backbenchers.

That’s democracy. Democracy fails when those sore loser groups are big enough and refuse to accept the results. Ultimately the presidency, for example, comes down to two candidates, and almost half the country did not vote for the winner.

The big problem with statewide anything, is that the individuals elected are not beholden to a small group and area. It might work in a state with 1 or 3 seats, but once you get to a dozen seats even knowing the candidates to make an informed choice is a problem. (What was the Eddie Murphy movie where he gets elected by having the same name as the deceased incumbent?) Worse, proportional representation - anyone can run, just get a few votes from several million people - will create a fragmention of special interest parties. (This is what happened in Israel - the general population is pretty easy going, but the key votes, Goetz-like, are readical fundamentalist parties who impose things like the busses don’t run on the Sabbath, restaurants close on the Sabbath and they want to enforce Kosher laws on them.) How many votes do you think an Anti-abortion party or a “Close things on Sunday” party would get in some states? A Reparations party?

A person representing a smaller single district is more likely to be concerned about real issues that affect their voters and less likely to maintain their position if they focus too exclusively on party dogma. Manchin, for example, Green New Deal or not, has to keep in mind much of his constituency makes a living from coal.

Australia IIRC has ranked voting for single seats, and a study I read about found that generally, the first vote results did not change very often when the ranked ballots were added in.

20

Point is, those states get disproportionate representation, which is what the Senate is supposed to be for. Instead, BOTH the House and Senate favor low population states, which kind of defeats the whole purpose.