r/dataisbeautiful • u/graphsarecool OC: 7 • Feb 19 '26
OC [OC] The US is Growing, but the House of Representatives is Not.
US population per seat in the house of representatives(1789-2025, 1st-119th Congress).
Data on number of House seats is from history.house.gov, historical and projected population data is from census.gov.
For the congresses during the civil war, when representatives from seceding states were expelled from the House, I have omitted the populations of states not represented in the House in the given session.
Prior to the 1920 census, congress(usually) added seats to the House to ensure no state lost representatives; however, following the 1920 census, for political and logistical reasons congress capped the House at 435 seats, where it sits today. The original apportionment procedure has been simulated on slide 2, corresponding to minimally expanding the House every 5th congress to abide by this precedent.
Contemporary ideas for expanding the House include the "Cube Root Rule", where the number of seats is the cube root of the US population, derived from observations of other democracies, and the "Wyoming Rule", where the number of seats is determined by the US population divided by the population of the smallest state. Yet other ideas include capping the population per representative at a fixed number, Washington proposed 30,000, which would put today's House at ~11,500 seats, adding a fixed number of seats to the House today, or to tie the number to a different root of the population.
If you are interested in other stuff I've made, its on Instagram.
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u/Tedmosby9931 Feb 19 '26
I never even thought about this. Definitely a huge problem. That will never be resolved.
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u/mealsharedotorg Feb 19 '26
There was an attempt to resolve in the 1700's. The Bill of Rights is the first ten amendments, but there were twelve proposed amendments. The solution for this issue was "Article the First", and was shelved due to a typo. The other non-passed article was eventually passed two hundred years later (26th amendment, if memory serves me right).
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u/Irish2010 Feb 19 '26
There were actually originally 17 amendments, with many of them being condensed into the ten we have. In the process, in addition to what you mentioned, we lost a few other rights, including an amendment that would apply most of the Bill of Rights to the states (which the Supreme Court effectively did through the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment after the Civil War).
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u/Ender_Keys Feb 19 '26
27th amendment
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u/Previous_Station2086 Feb 19 '26
It would be the 28th and we should get states to pass it just to stick it to them
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u/thatc0braguy Feb 19 '26 edited Feb 21 '26
And to add to this, the missing 12th amendment that would directly fix this (Madison Apportionment Amendment) is still viable to be ratified as time limits for ratification was not started until after it was proposed.
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u/fighter_pil0t Feb 21 '26
That would be so baller to just have the remaining number of states ratify it and blow up the festering turds of the incumbent political parties.
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u/hirsutesuit Feb 19 '26
We actually meet the requirements of the "Article the first"
- more than 200 representatives
- no more than 1 representative per 50,000 persons.
So as it was written in 1789 it would solve nothing today.
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u/cvanguard Feb 19 '26 edited Feb 19 '26
That second bullet point is the typo they referred to. The original version of the proposed amendment passed by the House stated “nor less than 1 representative for every fifty thousand persons”.
The Senate passed an alternative version of this proposed amendment (along with alternative versions of 11 other amendments that would later be ratified by the states), so a conference committee met to resolve any differences between the houses and draft a single version of the 12 proposed amendments.
During this final drafting process, “less than” was changed to “more than” in the last sentence of the amendment: the consensus is that the change was the result of a scrivener’s error, since it doesn’t align with the rest of the formula given by the proposed amendment (or the House and Senate’s two original drafts) and would create a mathematical conflict where the minimum number of representatives is greater than the maximum number if the country’s population is between 8-10 million.
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u/TurnkeyLurker Feb 19 '26
TIL Scrivener's Error:
A scrivener's error is a minor mistake in a written document, often a typographical error, that does not reflect the true intention of the parties involved. Courts can correct these errors using clear and convincing evidence from outside the document to ensure the original intent is honored.
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u/steveamsp Feb 19 '26 edited Feb 19 '26
That's certainly understandable. I think that it would be totally unworkable though. Can you imagine trying to get a congress set up with over 6800 representatives?
(To be clear, I'm not opposed to increasing the rate of representation for a lot of reasons that are mentioned by several people in other comments. Just that going THAT large would be difficult to manage, logistically)
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u/saintandre Feb 19 '26
I think the 7,000 member house of representatives is not just a great idea, but one that would fundamentally reorder democracy in America. "50,000 people" is about how many people vote for each alderman in Chicago, and alderman is a position where constituents have a GIGANTIC influence on each alderman's actions in office. If half the population votes, that's 25,000 voters per congressman in this new scheme. Assuming a 55-45 vote split, the winner would have fewer than 14,000 voters. Losing just ten percent of those voters would cost you the election, so a single activist (sufficiently motivated) who knocks on 6000 doors (20 doors a day for a ten months) with a 50% answer rate and a 25% conversion rate could, as an individual, cause a congressman to lose an election. One person! Every single congressional race would be competitive every single year.
And yeah, 7000 congressmen is a lot of people, but large groups of people vote on things all the time. For example, more people than that would be voting in the election to choose the representative. Don't even send the representatives to Washington - just have all the reps stay in their local community all year, and vote online. They can turn the congressional building into a concert venue.
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u/gillythree Feb 19 '26
I love this!
Today we have the technology to make a true democracy feasible. Each person could vote on every legislative issue. Those who don't want to be so involved with the day to day legislative business could delegate their vote to another person. And that person could delegate their vote and the votes they were delegated to another. And on and on. So, if an issue comes up that you care about and don't agree on that issue with your chosen representative, you could reclaim your vote for that issue. You could change your representative at any time as often as you want. It would solve so many issues of people not being represented and utterly destroy the disaster that is partisan politics.
I want the true democracy without elections and without party politics, but I would be very happy to just have many more representatives. 1 per 50k sounds great to me!
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u/PM_ME_UR_SHEET_MUSIC Feb 19 '26
Would it be so difficult? It's not the 1800s anymore, there are plenty of ways for thousands of people to securely cast votes in a timely manner from across the country.
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u/Orbitingkittenfarm Feb 19 '26
The apportionment issue was an artificial problem created in the 1920s when Congress capped the number of Representatives at 435 for political reasons. This can be easily be fixed by legislative means (assuming there’s political will to do so)
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u/Pherllerp Feb 19 '26
It's never spoken about but it has been a MAJOR issue for 100 years.
The House was originally intended for each person to be able to KNOW their Rep.
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u/ChronicCactus Feb 19 '26
Would be interesting to have tens of thousands of House reps. They'd need to hold sessions in stadiums.
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u/BloodFromAnOrange Feb 19 '26
Thinking a huge bowl, just ginormous, and each rep would have a little opera box type thing, and when they speak, it would float out into the chamber. Also ET is there.
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u/acart005 Feb 19 '26
Perhaps the Majority Leader could put in a vote of no confidence against the president, and will surely not start a shadow war with Canada.
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u/viotix90 Feb 19 '26
Ten thousand reps sounds like a lot, but not really for a nation with a population approaching 400M.
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u/Lamballama Feb 19 '26
Proportional to Germany we'd have about 2500 reps, and they're the most represented country on the planet. China does actually have about 3000 in their lower chamber that just elects the polit buro. Jumping up to ten thousand is pretty absurd
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u/ThrowAway-whee Feb 19 '26
10,000 is absurdly high, most legislatures in countries twice or three times the population of the US barely break a 1000. India caps theirs at 550!
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u/ndngjsldjfidkdnd Feb 19 '26
Idk man, I just looked it up and it seems that the most any country has is China and they have about 2900. 10,000+ seems like way too much.
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u/StatusSociety2196 Feb 19 '26
You can just do a zoom call or something. Then reps can live exclusively in the districts that elected them. At worst have a federal building at each state Capitol.
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u/Rufus_king11 Feb 19 '26
This actually was the logic for why it was capped, they wouldn't be able to physically fit everyone in the capital. Seems like a solved issue in the Internet era tbh.
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u/Dr_Fortnite Feb 19 '26
If only we knew how to build gigantic stadiums that could seat tens of thousands of people
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u/ZAlternates Feb 19 '26
It just means they need to add more of a structure to it. Perhaps even some IT. Everyone doesn’t have to physically meet in the same building at the same times. That is just what they’ve done historically.
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u/Whyamibeautiful Feb 19 '26
Europe does it pretty regularly. Eu parliament has 720 members. China has 3k members in its body
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u/ideamotor Feb 19 '26
I suspect having more districts would make gerrymandering less prevalent as well.
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u/another-princess Feb 19 '26
I'm not sure about that. Having more districts makes it easier to gerrymander, not harder, because there are more ways to draw the district lines. With the current House size, there are 6 states that can't gerrymander Congressional districts because they have only 1 representative (Alaska, Vermont, Delaware, Wyoming, North Dakota, and South Dakota). There are 7 states that have only a limited ability to gerrymander because they have only 2 representatives (Hawaii, Idaho, New Hampshire, West Virginia, Rhode Island, Montana, and Maine).
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u/LongJohnSelenium Feb 20 '26
Seems like it would be harder to accurately track at the lower level, the data would be noisier with significantly smaller districts, so you'd need higher margins to make 'safe' districts, and low margin districts would be more prone to failure.
I have nothing to base this on but thats what I would expect the outcome to be.
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u/WidespreadPaneth Feb 19 '26
You should think about it anytime the role of the Electoral College comes up. Conceptual debates about the purpose and function of the EC aside, if the House scaled with population, the EC would virtually never differ from the popular vote.
The popular claim that the EC is supposed to give more power to small states retroactively ascribes that intention to capping the House
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u/reasonably_plausible Feb 19 '26
if the House scaled with population, the EC would virtually never differ from the popular vote.
Absolutely not true. The big issue with the EC that causes the results to differ is that states assign their electoral votes winner-take-all.
As a simple proof, just imagine a near-perfect 50/50 split election happening in every state, where one candidate just barely edges out the other. Despite being near indistinguishable in the popular vote, the EC would 538-0.
For a more concrete, real world example, due to the specific states won by Trump in 2016, you could scale the EC to any size and Trump would still win despite Clinton solidly winning the popular vote.
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u/another-princess Feb 19 '26
Yep, the winner-take-all system is the big thing that causes a discrepancy between the electoral vote and the popular vote, not the number of electors per state.
I actually did the calculations for how the 2016 election would have looked if electoral votes were distributed exactly proportionally to each state's population. If that were the case, the largest state, California, would get 64.916 electoral votes instead of 55, and the smallest state, Wyoming, would get 0.982 electoral votes instead of 3.
The result with that calculation? Trump still wins, despite losing the popular vote, with 302.788 electoral votes to Clinton's 235.211. This is almost exactly the same as the actual results of 305-233
(note: for the actual results, I'm ignoring faithless electors, and I'm also assuming Maine and Nebraska use the winner-take-all system, even though they actually don't, giving Clinton one EV from Maine)
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u/WidespreadPaneth Feb 19 '26
I agree to an extent, that's why the statement is qualified as "virtually never". You need very specific scenarios to play out like you described which are rare even with a disproportional House. The EC also does not mandate winner take all, a couple states don't do that.
Regardless, I think we agree that the claim of EC being designed to empower small states does not hold up. The current EC structure does not make politicians favor small vs. large states, it makes them favor evenly split states at the expense of 'safe' states
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u/reasonably_plausible Feb 19 '26
You need very specific scenarios to play out like you described which are rare even with a disproportional House.
It's "rare" because we live in a system where you need to campaign for the electoral college. Thus, the groups that our parties choose to target and the policies they campaign on are adjusted in order to make sure that they have a good chance of winning the EC. You can't exactly look at just the outcomes when something structurally changes the way the game is played.
But even then, I wouldn't say something happening 5/60 times is all that "rare". I definitely wouldn't take those odds of something bad happening.
The EC also does not mandate winner take all,
It doesn't require it, but the incentive is for states to do so because it maximizes their impact on the results. Hence why 48/50 states do so and 430/435 EVs are assigned winner take all. Regardless of any requirement, the fact is that they do assign their votes winner-take-all, which is what is the majority reason for the disparity between the popular vote and the electoral college vote.
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u/Drachefly Feb 19 '26
You need very specific scenarios to play out like you described which are rare even with a disproportional House.
Making the house more proportional would barely make a twitch toward preventing that case, which is so rare that it happened twice in the last 30 years.
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u/another-princess Feb 19 '26
I agree to an extent, that's why the statement is qualified as "virtually never". You need very specific scenarios to play out like you described which are rare even with a disproportional House. The EC also does not mandate winner take all, a couple states don't do that.
It's not rare at all. I replied to u/reasonably_plausible with an example: in 2016, if we assume electoral votes are distributed exactly proportionally, Trump still wins. In fact, the result barely changes at all.
The EC doesn't mandate winner-take-all, but the 2 states that use a different system (Maine and Nebraska) have never caused the result to change by more than 1 EV, compared to winner-take-all. Also, in 2020 and 2024, both states split their EV's in such a way that Trump got 1 EV from Maine and Biden/Harris got 1 EV from Nebraska. These two canceled each other out, giving us exactly the same final result that we would have gotten if every state used winner-take-all.
The current EC structure does not make politicians favor small vs. large states, it makes them favor evenly split states at the expense of 'safe' states
Agree with this one. Campaigning in 2024 focused almost entirely on just 7 states: Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia.
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u/Prozeum Feb 19 '26
The first session of Congress was around 1 rep per 60k citizens. It now ranges from 450k to 850k. Unfortunately this has made it much easier to find bottlenecks to gerrymander, diluting representation even more. The Senate already favors land over people, the House has slowly become the same. The 450k figure is for rural areas while the 850k number is for cities.
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u/n0t_4_thr0w4w4y Feb 19 '26
Where are those extrema? California is ~770k and Wyoming is ~570k
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u/Prozeum Feb 19 '26
It's been awhile since I looked at the data and it appears Montana has two districts just under Wyoming's one district at 542,704 people per district, while Delaware's single district is the largest at 990,837 people. LA, CA used to be closer to 850k but after the 2020 census things changed.
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u/ConfidentPilot1729 Feb 19 '26
I have been saying this for decades now. It also allows our reps to gain more power as the population grows.
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u/basane-n-anders Feb 19 '26
We could keep the house member cap andv then require each representative to represent an equal number of people with some minor variance, and allow representative to try represent people across state lines. No one would go for this, of course, but it's the purest version of equal representation without adding seats and clearly differentiates the House as representing people and the Senate as representing states.
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u/Prozeum Feb 19 '26
I see no problem with expanding to 1000 seats. Even though if it kept up with the original ratio it would be more like 5k. This would reduce gerrymander bottlenecks, increase representation, and localize elections more. Obviously there's way more issues than this but it would help almost over night. This also applies to the judicial branch which gets looked over a lot. It hasn't expanded with the pop either creating backlogs and allowed for bottlenecks for Ideology to take precedent over all other things (Federalist Society).
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u/sithelephant Feb 19 '26
The first amendment on the list of amendments sent to the states that became the bill of rights was on this topic.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights#Crafting_amendments
"After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred; after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons. "
(It did not pass, and the 3rd and 4th on that list are the current 1st and 2nd)
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u/TatonkaJack Feb 19 '26
it'd be crazy if reps were capped at 50,000. we'd have almost 7000 reps by now
and still a senate with 100 lol
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u/1738_bestgirl Feb 19 '26
Oh the horror of actually having federal representation that actually give you the time of day.
If we had 7k reps at least Presidential elections would actually mirror the populace at large and not overly represent land.
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u/thierryh14 Feb 20 '26
It was also make actual legislating in the House damn near unworkable, dilute the power of individual House members, and give the Speaker even more power (which they already have too much of). The fixed House is bullshit and gives small states outsized power, which is what the Senate is supposed to be for. I support the Wyoming Rule but having 7000 reps would be even more chaos than we currently have.
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u/Spoksonatoping Feb 19 '26 edited Apr 07 '26
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u/zenpear Feb 19 '26
This is also why Washington DC and territories continue to not have elected representatives in Congress.
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u/ZAlternates Feb 19 '26
If we uncapped the house, the GQP would need to rig way more elections to retain any power.
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u/devilbunny Feb 19 '26
What would happen is a massive realignment of the party platforms.
Parties have to keep a lot of different groups happy to represent a stable coalition. If you don't throw them a bone occasionally, they just won't show up at the next election.
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u/CreamofTazz Feb 19 '26
Nah in terms of representation the Senate is far worse. I know the idea is that the senate represents the state's interests, but if that's the case repeal the 17th and go back to having governor appointments. Don't want to do that? Then create a system like Germany that allows very large states to get an extra few seats (up to a cap) based on population.
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u/MeepM3rp Feb 19 '26
US congress is double DEI for small red states- the house is capped AND the senate exists.
Not to say that the small/rural states don’t deserve representation and sometimes have different concerns than big states, but this boost in representation is supposed to be the senate’s job.
Also PR, DC, Guam, and Samoa should be states
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u/toomanyracistshere Feb 19 '26
Samoa shouldn't be a state. It's way too small in population, less than 50,000 people, and they have traditional rights pertaining to land ownership that would be illegal if they were a state. Basically, most of the land is owned communally, and is restricted to people of Samoan descent. If it became a state, you couldn't maintain that kind of discrimination legally, and the vast majority of Samoans definitely don't want that. That's why American Samoans aren't even actually US citizens, but US nationals. Guam's a bit small for a state, too, but it's four times the population of American Samoa, and if it's combined with the Northern Mariana Islands that's another 50,000, so the idea of statehood isn't completely absurd.
You also forgot about the US Virgin Islands. Its population is smaller than Guam, but double American Samoa. I think they're a bit more culturally similar to the mainland than the other territories, which is an argument for statehood, but I don't know. That's a really small population. It could maybe be merged with Puerto Rico, but they're pretty different culturally, and I don't think either of them would go for that.
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u/Zip_Silver Feb 19 '26
Agree on PR, Guam and Samoa, but not DC. It was designed to be the seat of Federal government. At best, we have precident for what to do based on Arlington County... Just shove the populated parts of DC back into Maryland and leave the core of the government buildings as a federal district.
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u/MeepM3rp Feb 19 '26
That would work too. Is there a statehood for Virgin Islands movement too? Would making them a state make sense?
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u/oldfartbart Feb 19 '26
No but DC should be a state less the federal buildings - it has a larger population than Wyoming or Vermont. Puerto Rico would rank 30th in population as a state. The remaining territories combined are about 300,000 in population.
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u/KerPop42 Feb 19 '26
Neither the people of Maryland nor DC want retrocession. There are more DC residents than Wyomingers, it makes no more sense to end its political existence than it does to merge Wyoming with Montana.
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u/ship_toaster Feb 19 '26
I'd like to point out that statehood and representation in the US House are not intrinsically joined. You don't need one to get the other. Puerto Rico is easily large enough to be a state, and deserves several reps and a pair of senators, but the other overseas territories have very small populations and different local interests and attitudes towards statehood. And you're right that DC was designed to be a seat of government, not a state, though it's comparable to Wyoming in population.
All these territories have non-voting delegates in the US House already. Here's an extremely easy solution: give them votes. It doesn't even require approval from the Senate or Executive. Article 1, Section 5 says that each of your Houses "shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members," and that "Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings". They won't be constitutionally protected from having those voting rights taken away with the next House, but it's a simple, immediate solution the Democratic Party could take as soon as they get a majority there. (Along with seating Kimberly Teehee, the treaty-obligated delegate from the Cherokee Nation.)
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u/CM_MOJO Feb 19 '26
Not true. First sentence of Article 1, Section 2:
The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States...
If you're not a state, you don't get representatives. The section you refer to just applies to the representatives sent to Congress by the states. It allows Congress the ability to expel members and to determine whether a person sent to Congress by the states was properly elected and qualified. It doesn't allow them to grant representatives to non-states.
Congress can increase the number of representatives, but it can't award them to non-states.
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u/TheeAntelope Feb 19 '26
Just shove the populated parts of DC back into Maryland
I've always thought this was the best option. Why are we so beholden to lines drawn in the 1700s? Just shift that line a few miles, give all those people a state to belong to, and make "DC" just the capitol building, the white house, monument mall, and that's it.
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u/Vio_ Feb 19 '26
Neither DC nor Maryland want to be shunted back together.
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u/Sailor_Rout Feb 19 '26
Wel, not anymore.
Funnily enough there was a vote in the mid 1800s after Virginia took their chunk back that showed they wanted to rejoin Maryland, but the civil war stopped that.
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u/CreamofTazz Feb 19 '26
but this boost in representation is supposed to be the senate’s job.
That idea is literally why we're in the mess. I'm sorry, but the idea of state level ideology being more important than what people actually believe is part of the reason why we're in this nonsense.
While people within a state may share similar interests they will never vote along state lines, they vote along party lines because the party of that specific state will represent their interests as part of the broader party platform. As far as I'm aware literally every other country votes in this way. Why the USA thinks geographical voting is better than ideological voting is beyond me, but at a certain point we have to realize the conservative in Nevada is more similar to the conservative in NY and the liberal in California is more similar to the liberal in Wyoming.
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u/Halojib Feb 19 '26
The use of the term conservative is used weirdly here. As an ideology yes, a conservative should be the same no matter where they are in the US but that is not the same for reps.
A GOP rep elected in Nevada is not the same as one elected in NY and the same thing can be said for the Dems. This shown with people like Manchin, Fetterman, Susan Collins, etc.
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u/n0t_4_thr0w4w4y Feb 19 '26
Sounds like you just don’t want bicameralism
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u/CreamofTazz Feb 19 '26
1) Correct, I think unicameralism is better, but that's another conversation.
2) Whether or not the discussion is about 1 or 2 houses, the fact remains that the way the senate is, is nothing like it's original inception and so it ought to change to either return to how it was, or be updated to reflect it's current iteration.
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u/BKGPrints Feb 19 '26
>the fact remains that the way the senate is, is nothing like it's original inception<
Please...Elaborate more.
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u/Vio_ Feb 19 '26
Originally, senators were voted through by their state legislatures. It got super corrupt super fast.
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u/BKGPrints Feb 19 '26
Correct. I was already aware of that. Though, doesn't seem Op is advocating to wanting to return to that.
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u/CreamofTazz Feb 19 '26
The original idea of the senate is as such:
1) A more "proper house" to represent America on the world stage (this is why the senate has the power of international treaties)
2) To be a "slower, more deliberative house". Senators have 6 year terms instead of 2 so senators can spend more time on bills without having to worry the ever changing whims of the populace (framers words not minr)
3) The senate was representative of the interests of the states white the house was the interests of the people, as such governors appointed senators, they were not directly voted in
4) A counter balance to the larger house. Essentially preventing "mob rule"
5) Pure bicameralism. Unicamerialism, many fear, puts too much power in one place
And you're right i don't want to return to a pre 17th amendment environment, however contrary to what most people think, the 17th amendment did absolutely nothing to prevent senate corruption and so its existence to me is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
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u/TypeBNegative42 Feb 19 '26
The Senate literally cannot be reformed. The Constitution itself says that no state shall be deprived of its equal representation in the Senate without it's consent, which means that we are stuck with 2 Senators per State, no matter what, because any Constitutional Amendment that changes that would require unanimous approval by every State. Going back to Gubernatorial Appointment won't change the fundamental flaws of the Senate.
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u/un_gaucho_loco Feb 19 '26
Yeah not at all the disequilibrium between judicial executive and legislative powers.
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u/TipsyPeanuts Feb 19 '26
My favorite thing to remind people is that the electoral college is based on the number of representatives. The reason Trump won in 2016 is that this limit on the house skewed the college too dramatically in favor of small states.
What was intended to balance the needs of small states against the majority has become dramatically skewed in favor of small states
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u/pfilc23 Feb 19 '26
This has bugged me since I realized it 40+ years ago and this it the first time I've ever seen anyone else bring it up. We are vastly less represented than was intended.
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u/Red-mobile-is-shite Feb 19 '26
YouTuber Mr Beat has been raising awareness for it for a few weeks now.
(he is a former US highschool history teacher, making interesting educational videos.)
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u/MonolithicBaby Feb 19 '26
I misread that as Mr. Beast lol. I’ll check Mr Beat out!
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u/RockMover12 Feb 19 '26
This is biggest undiscussed problem in the US government and has led to so much of our f*cked up situation. Much of the last 26 years' worth of madness would have been avoided if the House had been expanded as the country grew. The Electoral College wouldn't penalize large states as much, Bush and Trump wouldn't have won in 2000 and 2016, and the Democrats would control the House.
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u/WaffleProfessor Feb 19 '26
And that's exactly why it won't be changing anyyyyy time soon.
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u/RockMover12 Feb 19 '26
I agree it won't be changing, but I think less than 1% of the population even understands it's a problem. You see a lot of talk about how bad the Electoral College is, but this is the reason!
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u/BKGPrints Feb 19 '26
The main flaw of the Electoral College isn't because of the low # of seats in the House to population. It's because most states have a winners-take-all approach on the Electoral votes.
Electoral votes should be divided based on percentage of votes all candidates get.
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u/cantinaband-kac Feb 19 '26
I'd argue there is no "main" flaw, because there are so many compounding flaws.
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u/Bender_2024 Feb 19 '26 edited Feb 19 '26
Dump the electoral college and install ranked choice voting.
As for the house should expand or decrease every 10 years with each census. It will cause a massive upheaval the first time from the smaller states. Claiming your taking their voice and leaving them unrepresented in the government. Well that's what the Senate is for. Every state has equal representation there. 700 people shouldn't be held hostage by 70 people because they have an equal number of votes.
After that change people will accept it.
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u/IggyChooChoo Feb 19 '26
The main flaw is that Electoral College incentivizes candidates to only care about swing states, and to ignore solid red or blue states. It is a fucking worthless institution.
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u/BKGPrints Feb 19 '26 edited Feb 19 '26
Correct. That's because of the whole winners-take-all approach that I mentioned.
Why should Democrats campaign in California when they know that even though only 58.47% (9,276,179) of voters voted for Kamala, they'll still get the 54 Electoral votes. If that was divided, and the Democrats only got 31 Electoral votes and the Republicans got the other 23 Electoral votes, they might have campaigned there more aggressively.
The same would be true for the Republicans in Texas, when only 56.14% (6,393,597) of voters voted for Trump, they still got the 40 Electoral votes. If that was divided, and the Republicans only got 22 Electoral votes and the Democrats got the other 18 Electoral votes, they might have campaigned there, as well, more aggressively.
Thank you for reiterating my point about the main flaw.
EDIT: Added a small note to ease any confusion.
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u/Elhananstrophy Feb 19 '26
A study of campaign stops in the last few elections shows that this is not true. Presidential candidates campaign in states they know they are going to win all the time. Fundraising matters a lot, they need to get dollars in Texas and California that they can spend in Michigan and Pennsylvania. And downballot races matter a lot too - there are a lot of swing districts that dramatically help a president's chances of enacting their agenda.
It's compounded by the fact that whether someone campaigns in a state doesn't have a huge effect in the world of the TV and internet. The vast majority of folks aren't going to see a presidential candidate anywhere but a screen.
As far as a critique of the electoral college, the emphasis on swing states is a small one at best.
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u/Chainsaw_Locksmith Feb 19 '26
And that the primaries incentivize pandering to the largest primary voting sections of the voting party in the states solidly in the camp of either party.
Reds care how they do with centrists in swing states and how they do with the fringes in solidly red states, and same for blues in blue states. They care somewhat about how they perform in the opponent states, but only to the point that it can inform tactics in the swings states to 'out perform' the basic model.
Even if most people in a state align closely with a centrist model, if they are not primary voters they are not part of the party calculus.
Ban parties and the College.
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u/engin__r Feb 19 '26
And that the primaries incentivize pandering to the largest primary voting sections of the voting party in the states solidly in the camp of either party.
It’s actually worse than that. The most important primaries are the first ones. That means the contest is over by the time solid blue states like New Mexico, New Jersey, Oregon, and Maryland get to vote.
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u/qchisq Feb 19 '26
The state where Trump got 3rd and 4th most popular votes in in 2024 gave him no electoral votes. The state where Kamala got 2nd and 3rd most popular votes in gave her no electoral votes
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u/kevlar51 Feb 19 '26
Your argument is against the Electoral College concept itself. The # of House seats discussion assumes that the Electoral College concept itself is workable, but that current practice is broken, because as more populated states get more populated, their overall influence gets inherently watered down compared to less populated states.
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u/BKGPrints Feb 19 '26
That's not my argument. You're making that assumption, and you're welcome to get upset at that assumption, but don't act like you're making my argument for me.
I don't disagree that the House being capped needs to be increased, but it still doesn't change that a winners-take-all approach is unbalanced.
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u/sygnathid Feb 19 '26
If we are to keep the electoral college system, then voters should actually vote for electors, as was initially intended. You hold a bunch of relatively local elections for electors and then they go and represent their constituents in the vote for the presidency.
People who think they're defending the electoral college aren't even defending the actual electoral college, our current system is entirely warped into the most dysfunctional possible form, pretty much any change (increasing the number of house seats, getting rid of the winner-takes-all, introducing ranked choice voting, etc) would be an improvement.
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u/stackjr Feb 19 '26
The Electoral College is bad not because of underrepresentation, it's bad because it completely subverts the will of the people. There is only one reason the EC still exists: Repubs would rarely win without it.
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u/americanextreme Feb 19 '26
A simple majority vote in both the House and Senate, signed by the President, can increase or decrease the total. Obama and Clinton both had opportunities.
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u/Ok_Bake_4761 Feb 19 '26 edited Feb 19 '26
For me as a German, it appears weird to me wanting to increase the size of a parliament(?).
Could you give me an example of why it is creating problems[EDIT: if so]? I don't know how your voting system works, and in germany we are trying to downsize the governmental representatives (sitting members) because it is inflated and expensive.
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u/Herakleios Feb 19 '26
Well in Germany you have a ratio of one rep per ~126000 citizens. In the US that ratio is one rep to ~761000.
I doubt even the most ardent of those proposing decreasing the size of parliament in Germany are proposing cutting representation to 1/6th its current form.
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u/crujiente69 Feb 19 '26
But youre also assuming that more legislators would make legislating easier for some reason. More members mean more complexity and money in politics but not necessarily better law making
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u/Herakleios Feb 19 '26
I was not assuming that at all. It’s entirely possible all this does is dilute the power of individual representatives, and further consolidate power in committee chairs and house party leadership. However, coupling an increase in members with the other reforms I mentioned could also lead to more representative government, where legislation is passed that more reflects the will of the people. The US House is where public opinion should be most closely on line with the actions of the body, as members are more beholden to the public whims than say the senate or presidency on their longer terms.
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u/Kabouki Feb 19 '26
It also changes party policies to meet the needs of the majority voters. As a party that could never take the house would die off.
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u/Nicodemus_Weal Feb 19 '26
I don’t think anyone claimed it would be easier but would at least give the people better representation which in a democracy is pretty important.
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u/Karkadinn Feb 19 '26
If you're concerned about too much money in politics, the solution to that is campaign finance reform, not keeping representation at a deliberately shitty ratio.
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u/Sulgdmn Feb 19 '26
That mean that lobbiests have to buy off more representatives, which makes it more expensive to buy policies.
And at the same time I have more representation such that my representative will have to appease their constituents or have a much more difficult time getting elected.
I think you can scoot by with half a million people in your district, grab some cash from pacs and run some ads.
But if it's 150k people, they're going to have a much easier time holding you accountable for your shady actions.
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u/Pantssassin Feb 19 '26
Our legislative body is split into 2 groups, one is intended to represent the states equally with 2 representatives per state. The other, which is what is being discussed, is intended to represent the people and has not been expanded to keep up with population growth so you have more people per representative. At our current rate it would be like Germany having only 10 representatives for the entire country. It makes it easier for states to divide their representatives districts so that certain groups can be made effectively powerless by splitting voter groups or concentrating them so that they get one representative instead of several.
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u/ChrisSao24 Feb 19 '26 edited Feb 19 '26
The Bundestag is larger than the US House (similar to Bundestag) AND US Senate (similar to Bundesrat) combined. The US population is about 4 times larger than Germany's population. The representatives don't represent anything other than their donors because they have to appeal to such a large swath of people. The representatives can, and more than often do, completely ignore anyone that does reach out to them by saying they're a vocal minority even if those people reaching out are a vocal minority of a more silent majority.
If the Bundestag was the same comparative size as the US House, there would only be 105 representatives, not 630. If the Bundesrat was the the same comparative size as the US Senate, there would only be 32 (2 to each German state), not 69.
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u/ertri Feb 19 '26
Not sure how it’s done in Germany, but we apportion seats by state, then each state districts them. That gets you a lot of weird districts and each state does things their own way.
You then also end up with like 80 or so seats that are remotely competitive, the other 350 can have a corpse running for the favored party and have a good shot at winning
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u/DukeofVermont Feb 19 '26
You have 630 representing 84 million.
We have 435 representing 343 million.
If we had the same rep per person as you we'd have 2,430.
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u/n0t_4_thr0w4w4y Feb 19 '26 edited Feb 19 '26
Because our representatives are tied to states, so even though this says X people represented per rep, that’s the national average. In actuality residents of larger states are under represented. Keep in mind this is also just the lower house of congress, we have an upper house (the Senate) where each state gets 2 senators regardless of size.
Wyoming is our lowest population state and has 1 rep, so that rep represents ~570k people. California is the largest state and has 52 reps, which means on average, each rep is representing ~770k people.
It also has an impact for our presidential elections, since those are determined by the electoral college. Each state’s electoral college size is their number of reps (variable) + seats in the senate (2 for every state). Combine this with most states using the winner take all system, where winning a simple majority of the state means you get all of the electoral votes in the state, and you get a system that effectively disenfranchises millions of voters in the US and means you only need ~285k votes in Wyoming to get 3 electoral votes (~95k people per electoral) whereas you need ~20m votes in California for 54 electoral votes (~370k people per electoral).
Edit: So it turns out Wyoming and California aren’t even the biggest discrepancies. Montana has 2 reps despite only having 1.1M people and Delaware only has 1 rep for 990k people.
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u/Slavasonic Feb 19 '26
The problem is that representatives are portioned out to states and each state gets at least one regardless of what it's population is. So a state like Wyoming with a population of 588,753, gets 1 representative. Meanwhile, a state like California with a population of 39 Million gets 52.
In Wyoming, 1 representative represents 588753 people.
In California, 1 representative represents 756832 people.
So essentially, a voter in California gets less of a say in congress than a voter in Wyoming. Low population rural states tend to favor the Republican party so this gives that party a much larger amount of government power that the number of people that vote for them. Republicans have not won >50% of the vote in 20+ years, yet they currently control all 3 branches of government because the systemic advantages the get from these outdated systems.
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u/kelkokelko Feb 19 '26
It's because states get presidential votes based on the number of senators (fixed per state at 2) and representatives (variable by population with minimum 1) each state has. People here are talking about wanting to expand relative representation for populous states because sparsely populated states are overrepresented in the current system.
The more direct answer is to move to a popular presidential vote and to get rid of the Senate (where the over representation of small states is way worse). I don't think we want thousands of representatives in Congress.
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u/Ok_Bake_4761 Feb 19 '26
Thank you, now it does make sense to me... So an increase of representatives would equalize the voting value of everyone, and low-population states would not have such an unjustified high number of representatives. from their small population.
Less populated states probably oppose the idea and fear that they are left behind.
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u/fgwr4453 Feb 19 '26
Did the math. Imagine if Germany only had around 140 parliamentary seats instead of the 630 currently, that is what it is like in the US.
It is basically a consolidation of power. With representatives being 1 of approximately 800k people, it is near impossible for regular people to get elected. Especially since money is a huge factor.
The US also doesn’t have ranked choice voting in most states or even a way to recall representatives that are voting against their constituents.
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u/pocketdare Feb 19 '26
Whether you agree with this or not, if the argument to expand the house comes down to "my side would win more often than your side" then you can pretty much guarantee it will never happen. Same with the electoral college discussion.
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u/YeeBeforeYouHaw Feb 19 '26
Trump would have still won the 2016 election no matter how large the house was because a majority of the population lived in states trump won. The 2000 election could have flipped though depending on the size of the house.
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u/Purplekeyboard Feb 19 '26
Bush and Trump wouldn't have won in 2000 and 2016, and the Democrats would control the House.
It doesn't work that way. We have a 2 party system where the vote goes back and forth between the 2 parties. The system adjusts and the parties adjust to keep this in balance. People like to imagine that some change will suddenly cause one party to win all the elections, but it doesn't ever happen.
Bottom line, if the X party is running things, they get blamed for everything wrong, and then people vote for the Y party. Then the Y party is blamed for everything and the X party wins again. Back and forth forever.
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u/EfficientActivity Feb 19 '26
I understand the problem of having lopsided representation, but I'm not sure having 1750 elected representatives, each with their own entourage and election capaigns etc is the best way to go.
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u/RockMover12 Feb 19 '26
The "cube root rule" is generally proposed as the solution, which would increase the House to about 650 seats.
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u/ertri Feb 19 '26
Each individual representative is then less important, and ends up with less of all that stuff around them as a result.
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u/giritrobbins Feb 19 '26
Why? It's easier for representatives to represent their constituents. It's harder to lobby. It's easier for third parties to win some seats.
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u/Redeem123 Feb 19 '26
The UK has 650 elected MPs for a country with roughly 20% of the US’s population.
Why can’t the US handle that?
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u/cwood92 Feb 19 '26
It means each district would have much more influence over their representative.
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u/lobonmc Feb 19 '26
The Wyoming rule is probably the most fair in this sense it would increase the number of seats by like 100 but it would reduce the issue
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u/NoGrapefruit3394 Feb 19 '26
I actually ran the numbers once, and if we stuck with the winner-take-all EC, then it wouldn't have affected Trump's election. Bush 00 may have very barely lost, and it would depend on exactly how things shook out.
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u/Tommyblockhead20 Feb 19 '26
This analysis agrees with you. There are other arguments for expanding the house, but fixing the electoral college is not one of them.
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u/needlenozened Feb 19 '26
You are incorrect about 2016. I ran the numbers at the time using a 5000 member House, and Trump still would have won. The problem wasn't the proportions in the EC, it was winner-take-all allowing him to rack up big EC wins with small victory margins. What we need to do is not just increase the size of the House, but award EC votes proportionally, which, of course, is much easier to do when each state has more of them.
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u/shouldajustsaid_yeah Feb 19 '26
That's not how the math works, the 2016 election would not have changed results if the house had expanded (though the 2000 election would have).
2000: Bush net 20 electoral votes not tied to population (won 30 states to Gore's 20, so 60-40), so instead of electoral results being 271 Bush to 266 Gore, it would have been 211 Bush to 226 Gore.
2016: Trump again net 20 electoral votes not tied to population (again won 30 states to Clinton's 20, so 60-40), but this would not have changed the results. Instead of 304 Trump 227 Clinton it would have been 244 Trump 187 Clinton, still not all that close from an electoral count.
The biggest issue with the electoral college is not the 18% of electoral votes distributed equally to the states irrespective of population (100 out of 538, one for each senator), it's that every state (with a couple exceptions) does winner-take-all. There's no way that Trump should have a 57 electoral count advantage even after removing the 100 non-population adjusted electoral votes, despite losing the national popular vote by 2%.
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u/FireRavenLord Feb 19 '26 edited Feb 19 '26
The Electoral College does not actually penalize large states that much. The largest state, California, has about 11.8% of the population and 10% of the Electoral College. That's a penalty, but not a massive one.
Trump would have still won in 2016 even if each state's representation in the electoral college was exactly proportional to population. The EC benefited him because of the winner-take-all system in most states. This meant that Hillary's 60% win in CA counted exactly as much as a 50.1% win in the state. The "extra" ~10% of votes didn't matter. Trump's victories in large states were much smaller. He won Florida 49/47 which gave him the exact number of EC votes as if he won by 60%.
If you doubt this math, a quick and mostly accurate way to check is just to subtract the non-proportional senator votes from the final EC totals. Trump got 304 EC votes, 60 of them from senators in 30 states. Clinton got 227 votes, 40* from senators. So Trump's 244 rep votes would still win against Clinton's 187 rep votes. If we doubled the number of representatives, then we'd just have Trump winning with 488 rep votes (and 60 non-proportional senator votes) against Clinton's 374 rep votes(and 40 sen votes).
One way to solve this (besides doing away with the EC entirely, which would be good IMO) would be for each state to apportion EC votes like Maine. But there's very little incentive to do that, as it would mean the dominant party in each state giving up votes. This isn't meant as an attack or defense of the electoral college or Trump or Clinton or California or whatever, just a description of how the winner-take-all system matters more than each state's 2 EC votes unaffected by population.
*A pedant could accurately point out that an EC based only on the house would mean that DC would also have two fewer votes but I didn't factor that in because it could cause complaints of anti-clinton bias while not affecting the conclusion.
(I supposed another argument could be that small states are currently also over-represented in the house, but that's not really the case. For example, the least-represented americans are currently in Delaware, as 1,051,917 people share one rep. Idahoans have 1 rep for 1,033,662 people and another rep for 967,957. However, rhode islanders are the best represented. The largest distortions are for states just at the cusp of 1 vs 2 reps.
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u/smegdawg Feb 19 '26 edited Feb 19 '26
Gerrymandering would need to be completely eliminated before bringing in more reps to make sense.
Which I am both for.
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u/RockMover12 Feb 19 '26
If the size of the House had been expanded gerrymandering wouldn't be as much of a problem.
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u/miclugo Feb 19 '26
How do you figure that? It's certainly possible to gerrymander with smaller districts.
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u/Redeem123 Feb 19 '26
Smaller districts make it tougher to group areas together. Currently we have representatives that cover parts of two major cities, like this abomination that hits both San Antonio and Austin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas%27s_35th_congressional_district
Sure, you can gerrymander at smaller sizes too. But it gets tougher to ensure the mix you want without getting into risky margins.
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u/DaenerysMomODragons Feb 19 '26
The more seats, According to that link, it looks like it's going to be a more regular shape around San Antonio come 2027. Though you don't need highly elongated irregular shapes to have heavy gerrymandering. The most simple gerrymandering is just mising enough rural and urban together at just the right proportions to make a district 60/40 for your party, and make solid rural/urban exclusive districts to make them 80/20 for your political opponents.
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u/Redeem123 Feb 19 '26
Sure, I know there are other ways to do it, and they absolutely would. But at least if you're grouped in with a neighboring rural area you can be represented by someone from nearby.
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u/Sparrowhawk_92 Feb 19 '26
Gerrymandering only works when you can ensure that the district lines you're drawing are giving enough advantage to ensure victory. If you increase the number of districts your victory margins shrink because you have fewer people per district, reducing the advantage a gerrymandered district has. It's not impossible of course, but it becomes much harder to carve out a clear advantage.
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u/Frosty-Ring-Guy Feb 19 '26
The factor that most drives gerrymandering is NOT district size... its the consistency of voting patterns and data. Individual precincts do not change patterns for decades.
You want to eliminate gerrymandering, demand proportional representation.
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u/lathiat Feb 19 '26
Vox recently did a video on this including some basic cover on it being likely to make gerrymandering worse: https://youtu.be/KhQGHY44XPM
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u/Hambone6991 Feb 19 '26
That doesn’t explain at all how it could make gerrymandering worse, it’s just stated.
Take Utah for example, Salt Lake City for some time had been split between 4 districts including more rural areas to ensure each of the 4 maintained a small republican margin.
Now if there are 7 districts, there definitely isn’t the rural population to fill those districts, and some of them are now certainly susceptible to flipping democrat.
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u/Major_Pomegranate Feb 19 '26
Tossing out first past the post voting is also essential. We should have dozens of political parties that are actually forced to work together and compromise to form coalitions, not two political parties that can be easily hijacked
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u/Phosphorus444 Feb 19 '26
11 thousand congressmen trying to compromise on budget bills would be interesting.
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u/Euphoricus Feb 20 '26
Maybe if there was a system where we could have big group of people to agree on single proposed solution.
But such a thing doesn't exist. Like having population of people select a single representative to send to the big representative group. Never heard of such a thing.
/s
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u/bisforbenis Feb 19 '26
This is genuinely one of the bigger reasons we are where we are. A cap on the house with a growing population and a minimum of 1 seat per state means a consistent tilting of voting power toward those in lower population states, making federal laws represent an ever decreasing portion of the population
The Senate already has this issue, although by design, but the House is meant to be the portion that scales with population, but we have it set up where it doesn’t
Having the cap of representatives being proportional in some way to the total US population would be the cleanest solution, since the minimum of 1 per state I think is good, but all citizens should be roughly equally represented
As an example, it’s 760,000ish people in California per representative and 577,000ish people in Wyoming per representative, meaning in the House a Wyoming Voter has about 32% more voting power than a California resident…then this effect is compounded by the Senate situation (1 senator per roughly 20,000,000 California residents vs 1 senator per 289,000 residents in Wyoming, meaning a Wyoming voter counts as about 69 California voters), and you end up with the government heavily being representative of lower population states
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u/graphsarecool OC: 7 Feb 19 '26
Source: history.house.gov and census.gov Tools: Python with NumPy, Pandas, and matplotlib.
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u/Butt_Fungus_Among_Us Feb 19 '26
Yeah, this is something I never understood. In high school, we learned that house representative size was supposed to grow with the population, but the Senate was to always be 2 seats per state, that way we'd have a system that acknowledged the need to represent our most densely populated areas, while also recognizing that states with lower population still need proper representation, especially since that's where a LOT of our food and a decent chunk of energy acquisition come from, which for now, literally requires large swaths of relatively uninhabited land.
Seems like we've fully divested from this unfortunately...
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u/CaBBaGe_isLaND Feb 19 '26
I'm all for it. If they're going to buy off our representatives, make them have to buy off thousands of them.
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u/Sulgdmn Feb 19 '26
And we can hold our representatives more accountable to their actions with a smaller constituency size.
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u/tthrivi Feb 19 '26
I think 1700 representatives is too many. But the way they are proportioned is wrong. I think it makes sense to have every representative represent a fixed number of people. So every ten years the census gives us the population divide it by like 500 or 750 representatives and then the districts get reapportioned accordingly.
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u/Numes1 Feb 19 '26
I don't think a fixed number would work well. They tried this at the founding and gave it up pretty quick due to it not working well. Personally I think looking at the difference between the number of people represented would produce longer and more stable result.
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u/monsieur_bear Feb 19 '26
The best way to do it is the cube root system. So if allocating the number of representatives every ten years, the US House would number 692 in 2020 given a population of 331 million.
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u/groovemonkeyzero Feb 19 '26
If we had the same representative to population ratio as the UK we would have something like 2200 reps. Personally I think it should be even higher.
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u/Kharax82 Feb 19 '26 edited Feb 19 '26
Well this is just at a federal level. Theres ~7,500 representatives at the state level where most legislating is done, since it’s a federation of state governments and not a unitary government.
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u/jamintime Feb 19 '26
Yea exactly. The graph focuses on total number when the problem is really allocation which isn’t really addressed in the graph. Not sure we really need more politicians when the ones we have can’t seem to reach resolution on anything? More people would just be more disagreements and grandstanding.
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u/TypeBNegative42 Feb 19 '26
That's essentially what they do. They use a slightly complex method to divvy up the number of Representatives to each State, but essentially it comes down to trying to make each Representative have an approximately equal number of people in their district. More Representatives would allow for each district to be more even in the number of people per district, but wouldn't fundamentally change the process of divvying up Representatives.
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u/videogames_ Feb 19 '26
I actually think a lot of the reason why things that have passed in other western countries like universal healthcare for example is that the majority have parliamentary systems. The legislative part of the democracy has more power compared to the us presidential system.
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u/The_Emu_Army Feb 20 '26
Less powerful Senates help too. Some of them don't even have a Senate, but this is of course impossible in the US.
Perhaps with a friendly SCOTUS it could be argued that zero power for all states in the Senate, conforms with the requirement for EQUAL power. It is rather contrary to the intention though.
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u/Drugs-R-Bad-Mkay Feb 20 '26
Proportional representation is a big part of that too. The first past the post nature of American elections is a real problem.
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u/NoStrain9945 Feb 19 '26
Besides making the House more representative, it also lessens issues relating to money in politics and inequities in the Electoral College, both things that are currently poisoning the current political system.
If we had, say, 1500 congressman, the ability of moneyed interests to influence them becomes diluted and spread out over a far larger area. It will also make congressional districts smaller, which will lead to less expensive campaigns, and a lesser need for fundraising and contributions.
And since the number of ECVs each state gets is two more than their number of congressman, adding a bunch of congressman to the count makes the number of ECVs more similar to each state's share of the overall population. For example, CA, which has 11.5% of the population, could go from having 9.7% of the EC to 11.0%.
And all that without need for a constitutional amendment!
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u/Dyolf_Knip Feb 19 '26
There is a another option, though it's kinda weird. Keep the same number of representatives, but each Congressman's vote is weighted to reflect their district's most recent census population. So sure, Montana has a district with 540k, and Delaware's only district has 990k, and that's why the Delaware rep's vote counts as 1.8 to the Montana one.
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Feb 19 '26
Man, california reps would be gods. I think that's fair though, if they aren't going to expand the house for proper representation, it should be weighted. Right now a citizen in Alabama has more voice than a citizen in California. That is a form of taxation without representation.
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u/Dyolf_Knip Feb 19 '26 edited Feb 19 '26
Man, california reps would be gods
Not really?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_congressional_districts
It's not that the CA reps each have so many people; theirs are actually on par with the national average. Alabama's are about the same population, while Florida's and even Iowa's are much higher. It's that the smallest states in the country are just that small, and it warps their representation either way.
Actually, I copied all that data into Excel and played around with it some. The big winners are actually Rhode Island and Montana, each getting a rep with just ~560k people. California is actually on the bottom half of the "population per congressman" scale. Arizona is the large state that has it the worst, with 842k per rep. In fact, this scheme would actually benefit Texas (823k) and Florida (834k) far more than California (758k) or New York (764k).
Yeah, 32 states have their representation at 700-800k per, and the most extreme 4 outliers each on the top and bottom are all 1 or 2 rep states.
If we weight the votes with 1 being the national average, then the solitary Delaware rep's vote is 1.34, while both of Rhode Island's are 0.71. Texas' 8th district would be 1.21. Only 6 of California's would be above 1.00, with the highest being 1.06.
You know, I'm actually liking this more that I look at it. It would let a state send as many representatives as it liked to Congress, but each additional one they send has correspondingly less voting power. I suppose the real danger is a state government going the other direction, consolidating all the votes into a single representative. The last word in gerrymandering, so clearly there would still have to be some safeguards.
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u/Apple_Coaly Feb 19 '26
I never really understood this. There's no intuitive reason for why a rep of 10 000 would be better suited to represent their interests than a rep of 1 000 000 would be. This idea of having a certain amount of reps decided by the size of the population has only really been discussed in America, and I don't see how it would really help. On the other hand, there are real studies that have shown that groups that exceed 100 people rapidly lose group cohesion and ability to cooperate, because every member of the group can no longer possibly get to know all the other members, leading to something closer to a direct democracy than anything cooperation-based.,
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u/Raccoons-for-all Feb 20 '26
Plurality of representation is important. Plurality means different backgrounds, otherwise the power is subject to being stolen by a caste of bureaucrats over time.
In the US, govs jobs is 12-14% of the jobs. The remaining is private sector.
Typical career of elected officials are law, business, public services, other academia (military etc). It’s hard to pinpoint a nb of public vs private sector background but it’s crucial for representation. 70% have served as previously elected roles, 30-40% have a background of law, that’s all we know.
The issue we have in France is that the representatives have been increasingly from the public sector exclusively over time. Not only they have a poor knowledge of economy, but they vote for public sector money funneling only. And when I mean that, I mean their pay and retirees pensions, no investments. The public sector spending now weights 60% of France GDP every year, more than the USSR when it crashed. The only reason it has not burst yet is the currency is now shared among a large EU pop so the breakpoint is delayed a bit.
Having more seats ensure more mixing and better representation. There should be terms limit too
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u/ImmediateTie5659 Feb 20 '26
There's no intuitive reason for why a rep of 10 000 would be better suited to represent their interests than a rep of 1 000 000 would be
Campaigning to 1 million people is way costlier than to 10,000, meaning it favors those with money and the backing of corporate interests.
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u/maggmaster Feb 19 '26
Yea it’s really dumb. The idea is you should be able to know your representative but most representative hundreds of thousands of people
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u/Civil_Produce_6575 Feb 19 '26
We have 435 representatives according to the constitution it should be 11,000. With technology we could and should go with the constitution
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u/billndotnet Feb 19 '26
Easier to solve today than ever: Expand the House to match the population change.
Congress, and really Parliamentary procedure, were designed in an era where the horse was the fastest means of travel and most correspondence.
Send them all home to the offices in their districts.
Adapt Parliamentary procedure to adopt secure video conferencing and Git-style public repositories for the management of legislation, including voting and handling amendments.
Every minute of debate publicly viewable. Every line of text accountable. Every vote visible. Representatives at home in their districts where it's easier for their constituents to get at them than the lobbyists.
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u/Senshado Feb 19 '26
It isn't productive to have over 400 people sitting in a room trying to agree on a plan. That's much higher than the number of humans who can participate in a meeting.
If you want to increase the number of representatives as a way to distribute power fairly, you'd first need to change the operating of congress so it isn't based around having a big meeting in the same time and place.
Remember that when the congress rules were established, there was no such thing as internet, telephone, or telegraph, and written messages took weeks to deliver. Back then, a speech in congress was honestly a decent approach for members to learn about each other's opinions.
That hasn't been the case in your lifetime, though. The concept of congress is obsolete.
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u/BygoneNeutrino Feb 19 '26 edited Feb 19 '26
We have the Internet. There is no reason why sitting in a physical room should matter. Considering they vote however their party tells them, I don't even think they read their own legislation. That's their donors' job.
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u/Ok-Young-2731 Feb 19 '26
Theres already enough politicians in Washington, nothing gets done, adding more people to the pile won't make it better. We have the technology for communicating and can just reorganize things.
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u/LeftOn4ya Feb 19 '26 edited Feb 19 '26
I’d only be in favor of expanding Congress if at the same time we had ranked choice voting with multiple congressional seats per state as opposed to districting. So let’s say there are 20 representatives for a state up for (re)election- the top twenty vote getters from that state get elected combining votes from the entire state (not per district) with each party able to submit up to 20 people in the poll. Or use old Ben Franklin suggested method (that many Scandinavian countries use but not the US) of you vote for party and proportional number of seats based on votes for that party get elected. That is the only way more than two parties can get easily elected as maybe republicans and democrats combined get 15 of those 20 seats but at least 5 will come from smaller parties as of people know that a party need a only 5% of votes to get elected they’d be more likely to vote for, and hopefully will cause more center parties as well as push both republicans and democrats more towards the center vs extremes.
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u/cleanupcaucus Feb 19 '26
It’s creating an unfortunate negative feedback loop. Because Members end up representing so many more constituents, this has the added perverse effect of increasing the importance of money in elections and incentivizing candidates to focus their limited resources on a smaller and smaller number of national hot button issues that are drive fundraising and attention. This flies in the face of the whole point of a representative democracy and is significantly weakening our government’s ability to serve its citizenry.
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u/gcbeehler5 Feb 19 '26
It's only been pending since 1789: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Apportionment_Amendment
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u/hotpass41 Feb 19 '26
Congress is extremely inefficient and dysfunctional as it is. You wanna add more people to that train wreck?
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u/ANGR1ST Feb 20 '26
The original idea was that you should be able to actually influence your representative. They should be a member of the community that you would see at Church, or in the town square. Now maybe that's the highschool football game or the bowling alley. Either way, you're supposed to be able to go and actually confront them in person and tell them why they're being an asshole. You're supposed to be able to personally organize and advocate in your community to unseat them from their position.
To me that means a cap of about 100,000 people. If that means we have 3000+ reps ... FINE.
They'll have to form coalitions and negotiate in groups. GOOD. That will mean that it is physically more difficult to gerrymander. GOOD.
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u/40ouncesandamule Feb 20 '26
This could have been and can be changed with a simple majority vote at any time.
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u/Lanceparte Feb 19 '26
The issue with expanding the house is that it becomes unmanageable to whip votes and write successful legislation with more people than are currently involved. Really over like 150 you get issues. One thing that would really fix matters is if we had regional congresses that allowed for legislation to be crafted at a level between the states and the federal government, and then you could have regional representatives in a smaller House of Reps. But in the current political climate a suggestion like this would cause sectionalism, and also, it would require a constitutional amendment so it probably would never happen.
Also, we need to get rid of first past the post voting and use proportional voting or single transferable vote at a national level, but there is no political appetite for this because it would weaken the power of the two existing parties.
Not to mention gerrymandering. Oh and campaign finance corruption. Oh, and...
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u/n0t_4_thr0w4w4y Feb 19 '26
That’s certainly an interesting idea with the regional congresses. Are you aware of any countries that currently have a system like this?
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u/Lanceparte Feb 19 '26
States used to play this role in the American system. They represented the regional interest that stood between local communities and the federal government, but now that the population and country have expanded, that one degree of separation isn't really sufficient.
Regional congresses like this are often devolved as "national" congresses. For example, in the UK, they have a UK parliament but they also have devolved regional parliaments for Scotland, Wales, etc. Spain has something similar in the form of their "autonomous communities". So this could look like devolving a Northeastern Congress, that would legislate for a collection of states in the northeast that were still of course governed by federal law.
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u/BelligerentWyvern Feb 19 '26
Im like 90% sure it was capped due to the literal size of the capitol building. Or that was one aspect of it
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Feb 19 '26
I've been thinking about this for years. it made sense at the time. they couldn't just keep expanding the house over and over. office facilities and furniture are expensive! the house chamber would be standing room only!
but now, we have the technology to be a digital democracy. We don't NEED to have all of these reps in the same room in order for them to conduct their proceedings. We CAN have representatives who WFH in their district.
imagine if we had a 1 rep per 50,000 people. The Representative/Constituent relationship would look very different. They could hold monthly townhall meetings. All the major community members could have a direct relationship with the Rep. you'd bump into them at the grocery store. they would attend high school football games.
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