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Comment by ditterdun | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. 435 seems really arbitrary and worse that it was put into law by the same people that yield more power by limiting the number of their peers. It's really something that should be constitutional. Most bills are drafted in committee anyway, I'm not sure everyone needs to be sitting in the same room in 2018. More representatives would also mean more local involvement, e.g. your city might actually have their own federal representative. Also the campaigning would be less intense since you have less to gain for your dollar.

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It would definitely be an improvement. It also makes gerrymandering super hard. It's just a huge change that could happen at any time and completely throw off the government.

You can fix gerrymandering without changes to congressional limits. Simply use this criteria:

* All boundaries of a congressional district must be either a state's boundaries or fixed to a single latitude and/or longitude and meet at an approximate 90deg.

* Exceptions to the prior mentioned rule are acceptable only in the cases of remainder space, which is space remaining for a congressional district only after the prior rule is otherwise fully executed.

* Remainder space districts must not be adjacent.

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An alternative approach:

* Congressional districts must be limited to county borders in the case of low population density districts that may comprise multiple counties or subdivided entirely within a single county for high density districts.

* Subdivision of a county must occur strictly upon either points of latitude or longitude, but not both and cannot exceed the borders of any single county.

---

I believe the shape and size of congressional districts should be flexible to account for variances of population density. I happen to live in a state with a huge population and perhaps the most wild fluctuations in population density. For horrid examples of gerrymandering view our current congressional districts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_de...

Sure, but passing a federal law or constitutional amendment that would implement that solution is unlikely, because it is against the vested interests of the congressmen from gerrymandered districts who would be voting on it in the first place. On the other hand, ratifying the apportionment amendment would create so many congressional districts that gerrymandering would be effectively impossible.

Also, if you're going to go straight into fantasy land to solve gerrymandering, you can just do party-list proportional representation by state, or STV for smaller states, and then there's no districting at all. There's nothing in the constitution requiring congressional districts at all.

To me that doesn't make any sense. If it is in the vested interest of a congressman to maintain the convention of gerrymandering then any action to the contrary is equally unlikely. A constitutional amendment is the least likely scenario since it requires majority support of the congress as well the senate and states.

If you cannot expect congress to act in the peoples' interest the only viable solution is through federal court action. In the mean time, since I am in fantasy land (as you call it), I will prefer practical solutions no matter how improbable in the real world over constitutional amendment which is even more imaginary.

Also there is no reason to expect increased seats in congress will have any effect upon gerrymandering and may even make it substantially worse. It certainly won't make law making more efficient.

The apportionment amendment was already passed in the eighteenth century, so it just needs to be ratified by the states. No Congressional action necessary.

And while you could try to gerrymander an 11,000 seat House of Representatives, it would be a lot harder.

The only real solution to gerrymandering is to use a minimally-complicated algorithm.

The algorithm need not actually determine the districts. It can instead simply rate proposals, allowing a contest to be held. The highest scoring proposal submitted at least 400 days prior to the election is the winner, with earlier submissions winning any ties.

Another improvement would be to let districts spill over state borders. One could exempt Alaska and Hawaii of course.

Or you could just do away with it all and go for a one man one vote system. Why a vote in Kansas needs to be tallied differently from a vote in New York in the 2020 elections is beyond me.

Districts don't matter for the presidential election. They only affect apportionment in the House of Representatives, which is region based and is 1 man 1 vote (within state boundaries. Even across states the differences in voting power isn't as aggregious as the Senate or overall electoral college).

> Districts don't matter for the presidential election.

Except in Maine and Nebraska (selection of Presidential electors is largely a matter of state law, and most but not all states are winner take all.)

Like many features of the original constitution, protecting slavery (the slave states were modtly low population states, with even smaller voting populations, and were particularly concerned that equal representation would eventually turn against them—abolitionism was already a thing at the time of the Constitution, and they were very concerned about it taking hold) was a major concern. The representation structure (and it's special protection against revision by amendment) plus the 3/5 compromise plus the explicit, limit term, protection of the slave trade, among other provisions of the Constitution, were protection against that eventuality.

Because presidential elections are not popular elections. Kansas has proportional representation in the House but is absurdly over-represented in the Senate and slightly over-represented in the Presidency.

This is of course by design. The founder's obviously knew about proportional representation and they deliberately chose to disregard it. Shouldn't that give you pause to figure out why?

> The founder's obviously knew about proportional representation and they deliberately chose to disregard it. Shouldn't that give you pause to figure out why?

Turns out the reason was slavery. A huge proportion of the Southern population was enslaved, and slaves didn't vote. The free staters didn't want slaves to even count toward state population for the purposes of congressional apportionment, while the slave staters did, so they compromised on counting the slave population at 3/5 of the free population. As a result, prior to the abolition of slavery, the votes of free men in slave states were always represented at a higher proportion than the votes of free men in free states.

Many of the founders were wise and educated men who thought carefully and critically about how to establish a sustainable republic. But to do so, they had to win the votes of a cross-section of the American establishment of the time, many of whom thought that owning human beings, using them as farm labor, and whipping them if they disobeyed were morally acceptable things to do. And upon making a series of political compromises with these people, they had to rationalize those compromises in such a way to make them palatable to the general public.

Most of them were perfectly fine with owning people.

A lot them even owned their own slaves.

Indeed. With our current system, rural voices are at least marginally relevant. With a purely proportional system, rural voices would not even be heard.

The major reason is that smaller states wouldn't have joined any proposed Union that made them irrelevant, so the founders had to have things like the Senate to get them to join at all.

This is, of course, no longer relevant.

If it’s no longer relevant, it should be possible to convince small states both red & blue to accept an obviously superior system.

But it is still relevant for just about all the reasons it was relevant then.

I think if you had some way of forcing the issue, and telling states like Kansas and Mississippi that they didn't get to have disproportional control over the federal government anymore, and if they didn't like it, they could just stop being subsidized by California and New York, either they would go along with it, or they would secede from the union and deteriorate into third world countries.

Why would states persist in a union that made them irrelevant? The politics are still as relevant today as it was then.

It’s way harder to leave than it was to refrain from joining.

Another major factor is that Americans mostly see themselves as citizens of the USA first, and citizens of their state a distant second.

Because the alternative is worse.

They also didn't choose to tie electors to the per state popular vote and chose the electoral college in part to prevent the election of terrible candidates.

>Why a vote in Kansas needs to be tallied differently from a vote in New York in the 2020 elections is beyond me.

    population of Kansas (state):  2.9 million
    population of New York (city): 8.5 million

Without some sort of balancing mechanism, you wind up with a single populous city's votes mattering more than the votes from every city in a less populous state.

What is wrong with that, exactly? If the city is substantially larger than the state, it seems reasonable to me that its votes would matter more.

This is something our founders debated. It's never good to let the whims of the majority trample on the minority. It's why we have both the house of representatives (based on population) and the senate (flat number per state).

If little states have no say in our government, what point is there for them to remain?

It's a pity some folks devalue others simply because they don't wish to live in NYC or LA.

> It's never good to let the whims of the majority trample on the minority

You are arguing for the minority to trample on the majority.

That’s not what I’m arguing.

It needs to be competitive. The majority shouldn’t be able to have its way without the help of the minority.

Why is the rural minority so special? We don’t give other minorities this sort of treatment.

For example, the percentage of rural Americans is similar to the percentage of black Americans. Yet somehow nobody ever argues that black Americans need power disproportionate to their numbers to avoid being trampled.

> Why is the rural minority so special?

It's not about rural vs urban. It's about the assumption that the US is a union of separate _states_ with separate legal structures, cultures, etc, etc. So it's not the "rural minority" that's special; it's states that are special.

Now you may disagree with the premises there, of course. But if one accepts the premises, then one needs a way to prevent "big" states from just imposing their will on "small" ones.

(There are in fact people who argue that black Americans need disproportionate power, and some voting districts are set up to effectively produce that, but that has nothing to do with the setup of the US constitution per se.)

They called out NYC and LA so I don’t think they were thinking along the same lines you are.

Of course you need this if one accepts the premise that states are special. You’re basically just assuming the conclusion at that point.

I’m not aware of any voting district that’s set up to give black Americans a disproportionately large amount of power. There are some that are deliberately set up to ensure proportionate power.

I called out NYC and LA because they’re high population areas.

My point is this: delegating power to solely the majority is a bad idea, full stop. In a properly functioning society, the majority needs to work cooperatively with the minority, which means the minority needs some sort of functional advantage (like we have in the US Senate, with respect to states).

How individual states set up this power balance internally is up to them. Obviously I think it should follow a similar model to the one we have at the federal level with our collection of states.

It annoys me when people rag on smaller areas like RI or WY because they get “extra privileges” or some such nonsense when it comes to elections or the US congress.

This seems to assume that there is some fixed “the minority” that needs to be advantaged in order to be fair, and further that “the minority” corresponds to the smaller states.

In reality, there’s a different minority for every issue. Giving states with low population a disproportionate amount of power doesn’t necessarily balance the minority with the majority. Depending on the issue it may allow the majority to more easily trample the minority, or it may allow a minority to impose its will on the rest.

The solution to requiring cooperation with the minority is to require more than a simple majority to do things. See for example: removal following impeachment, constitutional amendment, treaty ratification, or the de facto situation in the Senate for most legislation at the moment.

We're a federal republic made up of 50 states plus DC. Balancing the power between _states_ is standard among federal republics (Germany, Switzerland, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, ...).

Federal republics _need_ the power balance among _states_, otherwise there's no point in the states participating in the republic, thus no point in even having a federal republic. If that's your point, fine. But you can't have your cake and eat it too.

How states want to balance out things internally is up to them, and that can be used to help the minority on specific issues.

A federal structure is a means to an end, not the goal itself. If it doesn’t serve the purpose we want then we should change it.

In any case, even if you take the state as the unit that needs to be balanced, my point stands: you can’t balance “the minority” by picking some arbitrary minority and giving them more power.

I can see an argument either way. More populated areas to legitimately represent commercial and cultural centers, but also, the needs of the entire system have to be considered.

What is it about rural voters that make them more important to the entire system?

Resources.

Yes, which is how it should be.

States have senators to prevent tyranny of the majority. NYC should be worth more house seats than all of Kansas.

Without some sort of rebalancing mechanism, you wind up with a singe empty state's votes mattering more than every voter in a city.

The mechanism you're talking about is the federal government.

I think the Senate is the major bottleneck. No matter the number of representatives you just have to bribe 50 senators.

A bill must be passed in identical form by both house & senate before it can be signed by the president. So 50-60 bribes could still be used to prevent new legislation, but much more money would be required to promote new legislation. Increasing the house size (growing w population, 1 rep per max 30,000 people as was once the case) would have likely prevented lots of the policy atrocities that have been passed in the last ~100 years. The electoral college is based on the number of congress members, so it would also limit the likelihood of the elected president losing the popular vote.

I’m surprised by how little money it takes to buy senators.

The whole concept of "buying" a politician isn't a very truthful way to frame what happens anyway. No politician votes in a way they weren't biased towards already just due to campaign contributions.

Indeed; people and organizations just contribute to the campaigns of people who already happen to support the policies that benefit them. Sometimes there's a sense of reciprocity, and sometimes there's small-scale corruption (e.g. Corporation X donates money to the campaign of Mr. Congressman, who in turn votes for an appropriations bill where the Pentagon orders 10 million units from Corporation X), but it doesn't seem to influence individual opinions on broad-scale policy. It's not as often that people get elected on an animal rights platform and then start taking money from Big Fur and turn around and vote for clubbing baby seals or something like that. Big Fur just saves their money and donates to the pro-seal-clubbing candidate in the first place.

It's less to do with the fact that they're accepting money from causes they are sympathetic toward and more related to the fact that they are now under an obligation to continue supporting the causes they've received money from or stop receiving donations, against the wishes of their constituents.

See, for example, the tax bill of 2017.

In your experience, what was the price you had to pay to buy a majority?

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