Why 435 members in house of representatives

The way it works is quite clever. After comping every state one representative, this algorithm uses a round-robin system to apportion the remaining seats one at a time to the state that needs another seat the most, until every seat is assigned and so ends the game of musical chairs.

So how many seats are ideal? To determine the magic number, I ran an experiment in which, using this official method of apportionment, I calculated how many delegates each state would get for every number of total seats from to 1,, three times the current figure. The results were curious. While the disparity declines as the House gets larger, as one would expect, there are certain key numbers of seats that are ideal. Looking under the hood, these magic numbers occur when the last underrepresented small state gets the last available seat.

Then, interestingly enough, it actually gets worse for obscenely large numbers of representatives. The optimal value, within reason, is seats, which would look like this:. Here, four small states get two seats — Alaska, North Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming — while the rest get at least three.

In none of the scenarios did the outcome of the election change, given that the winner-take-all system that almost every states uses for the Electoral College is impervious to the denominator. The question, of course, is what a member House of Representatives would look like. My suspicion is that it would be much more representative of the population it represents, with enough seats for a healthy variety of people from more than two parties and many walks of life, rather than the litany of lawyers and businessmen who make up the current roster.

Last June, the Supreme Court ruled in Rucho v. How do we proceed simultaneously to expand and reform? There are several thoughtful plans that could frame the debate. The place to start is a package of election and voting reforms introduced by Maryland Democratic Congressman John Sarbanes that includes a provision for nonpartisan commissions in the states to examine how to draw district lines fairly. Electing some members statewide will result in greater voter participation and more competitive House races, which is likely to mean fewer extreme candidates.

After the Census, in states receiving additional seats, parties would advance a list of statewide candidates. So, for example, if the votes cast for Democrats running in all of the district races amounted to 60 percent of the total statewide vote—Democrats would receive 60 percent of the at-large seats, and the Republicans would get 40 percent. The at-large concept is more nuanced than this example and is most likely to make sense in more populated states. The days of candidates running unopposed would be over.

Even in the districts that were overwhelmingly Democratic, the Republicans would still want to field a serious candidate to increase their aggregate statewide vote total. The same would be true for Democrats in strong Republican areas.

More competition for every seat will have a moderating effect on both parties. In order to be effective in maximizing their vote, parties will have to field candidates who appeal to more than a narrow ideological base. Increasing the total number of House members would also increase the size of the Electoral College by approximately , from to members. What impact would this have? In sum, the more populated states would increase their number of Electoral College votes significantly.

Consider a comparison of Wyoming and Florida. Today, Wyoming, with a population of ,, gets three electoral votes—one electoral vote per , people. Florida, meanwhile, with a population of But if congressional districts were reduced from , people to ,, Florida would grow to 37 congressional districts, and 39 electors, while Wyoming would still have just the three. Ohio would get four more congressional seats, and Michigan three more.

The big winners of course would be California with 16 more seats and Texas with This would translate into 71 electoral votes for California and 53 for Texas. Of course, the small states would hate this. But the Electoral College has given small states disproportionate power throughout our history.

Also, of course, slave states, in the beginning: The three-fifths compromise for counting enslaved people adopted at the Constitutional Convention gave the South more Electoral College votes, which resulted in five of the first six presidents being from Virginia.

All five were slaveholders. Increasing the size of the Electoral College would reduce the small-state advantage. The large and growing states—Florida, Texas, California, other Sun Belt states—will become more important to the outcome of the presidential election. Whether this increase in the larger states will favor one party over the other is not clear, but the means by which we elect a President will certainly be more representative of the population. And, of course, Nate Silver will have to change the name of his website.

For years, the right size of congressional districts was hotly debated. The stasis has left us an outlier among representative democracies. To understand the implications of a larger House, we enlisted software developer Kevin Baas and his Auto-Redistrict program to draw new congressional districts for the entire country.

Read on for an explanation of how we chose that number. Then we used historical partisan scores to determine which party would win each district. One main takeaway: it would create a more competitive landscape, with 25 percent of seats qualifying as toss-ups, compared to just 10 percent today.

Many states that elect only Republicans today would elect a Democrat or at least become more competitive, and vice versa. Arizona currently has three safe Democratic districts. Under the new system, it might not have any. The bottom line is that the House today is far too small, and that poses a big danger to American democracy. For starters, how does a single lawmaker stay in touch with the concerns of three-quarters of a million people?

Research shows that representatives of larger districts are more likely to take political positions at odds with what a majority of their constituents want. These representatives are also ripe targets for lobbyists and special interests, whose money enables them to campaign at scale, often with misleading messages. Special interests are more likely than regular voters to influence policy positions and votes.

Second, the cap on the number of House members leads to districts with wildly varying populations. Meanwhile, Rhode Island, which has roughly the same population as Montana, gets two seats. These discrepancies violate the basic constitutional principle of one-person-one-vote, causing voters to be unequally represented in the chamber that was designed to offset the Senate, where every state gets two seats regardless of population.

This is one of the many reasons the college is an unfair and antiquated mechanism: States that are already underrepresented in Congress have a weaker voice in choosing the president, again violating the principle that each citizen should have an equal vote. Congress set it in , but following the census — which counted nearly 14 million more people living in the United States — lawmakers refused to add seats out of concern that the House was getting too big to function effectively.

Rural members were also trying to forestall the shift in national power to the cities sound familiar? In , Congress passed a law capping the size of the House and shifting responsibility for future reapportionments onto the Commerce Department.

Moreover, they often better reflect the views and makeup of the people in their districts. Both he and Rodden noted that an expansion of the House could also increase the relative demographic diversity in the House. However, Rodden warned that opportunities to expand representation for minority groups could vary, especially in the South, where Black voters are often over-concentrated in districts to ensure representation. Adding seats to the House could have electoral benefits , too.

First, a growing House would make it less likely that states lose representation in the reapportionment process. Under current conditions, states with a shrinking population often lose seats, but this is true even of states where the population is growing. As Rodden told me, when you add more and more seats, you converge on proportional representation at some point because the districts just become so small.

Still, he cautioned that line drawers could get pretty creative, so more districts might not always result in more proportional representation. Clearly, expanding the House has many potential upsides — many of them beneficial to democracy, too — but, of course, a lot hinges on just how many seats would be added.

And on that point there is no easy answer. A number of ideas have emerged for how best to expand the House. Some reformers have suggested a one-time, arbitrary fix, like adding 50 seats.

Others have argued for a more substantive overhaul, like resizing the House based on the population of the smallest state — often called the Wyoming rule, as Wyoming has occupied this position since Matthew Shugart , a professor emeritus at University of California, Davis, has tried to unpack why this is often the case.

Of the 30 major democracies Shugart and his co-authors looked at alongside the U. Take Canada. But other bigger democracies like Brazil and Japan also have seat counts that fall fairly close to the cube root of their respective populations. Some countries like the U. And countries like Australia, India and Israel are even more underrepresented than the U. Democracy Read more. But as the chart below shows, the House would have to grow to seats to reflect where the cube root law expects representation in the U.

Regardless of the potential benefits of a bigger House, though, there would likely be steep opposition to expanding it because of some of the tradeoffs — and potential downsides — involved. For instance, a larger House would by necessity mean a bigger government and more spending. There could also be consequences for governing, too, such as more gridlock and partisanship.