Tweaking The Math Behind Political Representation

mlimber writes "Nature magazine's news section has an interesting story about how the seats in the US House of Representatives should be divided up. The problem is that the population isn't evenly divided by the number of seats in the House (435). So how should one allocate the fractional parts? The current method tends to favor big states, while a recent proposal by a mathematician is for what he calls a 'minimally unfair' allotment. He is predicting 'one person, one vote' challenges on this topic in the near future."

eh...

[Richard.g.k]

Is there anything new in this article? people have been complaining about congress seat inequality forever...

Correction

[sharp-bang]

The current method doesn't favor big states. FTA, "the current method has an inherent bias towards giving small states a boost up".

Re:Correction

[taniwha]

yup - somewhere like Wyoming with a population of 1/453 already gets more representation per person than someone in California (it has about 2/3 or 1/453 of the US population)

Re:One person, One vote only IN your state

[joggle]

Ummm, I only see one representative listed for Wyoming on the official US House of Representatives [house.gov] website. The guy wasn't suggesting adding representatives to Wyoming, but to Montana and some other states. Montana had a population of 902,195 in the 2000 census and 1 representative. That works out to a voting power of 0.00011% per person in Montana. California had a population of 33,871,648 and has 53 representatives (0.000156% per person).

His model wasn't trying to be fair, just less unfair. To be fair Wyoming would either need a fractional vote or the size of the House would have to be increased until each person in the house represented about 500,000 people. Since this isn't possible from his model's point of view he does the next best thing (removing votes from large states that have fewer people per representative to smaller states that currently have more people per representative).

With that said, I agree that small states don't need more representation in the House. They are more than adequately compensated by having 2 votes in the Senate. To put in perspective how powerful that is, imagine that even if San Francisco had 2 senators the Wyoming senators would still be representing fewer people. San Francisco has a population of about 750,000 (4th largest in California) vs. the population of 500,000 for the entire state of Wyoming.

Re:One person, One vote only IN your state

[quizzicus]

Wrong. Electoral votes are allocated by the number of Representatives plus the number of Senators (DC gets three when we pretend it has representation). Thus, the number of representatives in a state directly influences the number of electoral votes it gets.

Re:Fixing the wrong problem

[syphax]

It's called "the Senate."

Re:Add more seats

[exi1ed0ne]

I have long thought the House should be larger. It is meant to be representative, but the sheer size of each district now means that entire populations go ignored.

That's why to a large extent the States (and even larger extent The People) were originally suppose to be the major government entity, with the Congress tasked with only 18 authorized jobs to do. One of those is to show up one day a year, since the framers thought that there wouldn't be enough work.

The Alabama Paradox

[mblase]

I'm surprised the article could discuss the mathematics of this without bringing up the Alabama paradox [wikipedia.org] of 1880. It's an interesting example of how, using otherwise correct and normal mathematical distribution, increasing the number of seats in the House can actually decrease the representatives for a specific state.

Re:Correction

[CodeBuster]

That single representative could be quite influential, especially if he was very senior in years of service and was on the important committees compared to 53 more junior members from a larger state. This is why smaller states tend to elect the same guy over and over again because it increases their chances of getting more and better goodies in disproportionate amounts to their actual population or influence. Seniority matters in Congress.

Census - not accurate

[JaySSSS]

"To prevent gerrymandering, have independent boundary commissions to redistrict after every census."

This won't solve anything, because census data is not very accurate. The Constitution only authorizes Congress to require that numbers of people be collected. Other information, such as race, income, or any other measurement are voluntary. Many people either do not provide additional information, or deliberately mis-represent the data. I for one only provide the data is required by the Constitution, because I feel that census data is often mis-used, and there are many privacy issues with census questions. It also doesn't collect information in regards to homeless people (the census bureau estimates), and there is no adjustment for illegal aliens (people here illegally can fill out the census data and skew the numbers).

Re:Solving the wrong problem

[jsprat]

(...) they would by definition be reflecting the people who voted for them.

Not necessarily. Gerrymandering [wikipedia.org] is the art of changing the boundaries to gain an advantage. In a simple way, this image [wikipedia.org] shows an even distribution redivided to give one party the advantage.

bullcrap

[enos]

That's just an excuse to keep the current system in place.

My high school government teacher had a brilliant exercise for us: he gave us a map of Indiana with info on how each county voted (i.e. Democrat/Republican, to keep it simple). Then he assigned every student a party and everyone could draw districts such that their party would win ALL 10 seats.

The idea is to divide and conquer. By splitting up the opposing party's strong areas and absorbing pieces of them into your party's areas, you could essentially neutralize them.

The take home lesson is that whichever party is in power when the census is completed and redistricting happens is at a big advantage and they DO use it.
So sure, technically the representative is elected by the people in their district, but that district is no longer cohesive and is totally arbitrary (where arbitrary = convenient for the party that drew it).

Re:Solving the wrong problem

[russ1337]

Go and play these 5 missions in the redistricting game [redistrictinggame.org] from basic to advanced, and come back and tell me if you've changed your views or not.

Seriously, be honest.

Re:One person, One vote only IN your state

[FroBugg]

The parent was talking about the Electoral College [wikipedia.org], not the House of Representatives. The numbers are not the same, as every state has at least 3 Electors, even Wyoming.

Re:One person, One vote only IN your state

[ucblockhead]

He was talking about electoral votes, not representatives. A state gets one for each representative and one for each senator. The minimum number of electoral votes a state gets is three.

Re:Solving the wrong problem

[Taevin]

Do you seriously not get it, or are you deliberately trying to be obtuse? Of course the people who get elected got more votes, gerrymandering doesn't change the basic electoral system. What it does do is allow politicians to run virtually uncontested in a gerrymandered district. Since you completely ignored the rather obvious example of how this works provided by jsprat (in pictorial form, even!), I'll attempt to explain it again. In the original image, the two parties, green and magenta, are equally distributed in terms of voters (the dots). This would let to some very close elections, ranging from 4 green representatives to 4 magenta and everything in between (we'll say it evens out to 2 and 2). Now look at the gerrymandered example. There are now 3 representatives elected from the magenta party with no contest. See the problem?

If for some reason an elegantly simple example, such as the one in the Wikipedia article, is not sufficient, how about some real world examples [rangevoting.org]? Some of these districts are downright ludicrous. Are you seriously trying to tell me these district lines were drawn in an effort to create fair and unbiased voting districts?

Re:Solving the wrong problem

[Strilanc]

Its much more than an issue with personal preference. Consider that, with a perfect boundary, you can win the majority of regions with far less than 50% of the total vote, even with similarly sized regions.

region 1: 101 A, 100 B
region 2: 101 A, 100 B
region 3: 101 A, 100 B
region 4: 101 A, 100 B
region 5: 201 B
region 6: 201 B
region 7: 201 B
Total regions: 4 A, 3 B
Total votes: 404 A, 1003 B
A wins, but B should have won in a landslide

Re:Third House

[hawk]

It would actually give you the British House of Lords.

After centuries of titles entitled to a seat there falling through various hands, it is probably the most diverse legislative body in the world. There are plenty of Lords with no property or income other than their stipend for attending Parliament.

hawk