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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

I like the premise, but I don't think 6,300 representatives makes a lot of sense.

I like the proposed "Wyoming" rule. That each representative will represent no more than the population of the smallest state.

Today that would mean about 562 reps, which is manageable, in line with most of the other major world democracies, and would make the electoral college much more fair and balanced as originally intended.

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Another option is to let each state have as few or as many representatives as they want, but instead of going with one vote per representative, you weight the votes by the number of citizens that representative represents.

You could even go one step further and allow the top two or three vote-getters from each district to have a seat in the House, but their voting power is weighted by the number of votes they got.

Hopefully a number within reason. I could see some states protesting congressional salaries by having thousands of representatives.

Surely the salaries are also divided up in this scheme...

That seems like a reasonable solution. Perhaps if a state with a high representatives-per-constituent ratio wanted their representatives to be paid well, they could make up the difference out of their own budget.

I like the idea of weighted representation, though I think you'd have to take at least the top two to avoid disenfranchising a significant fraction of the population under a winner-take-all approach, given our two-party politics. Taking the top 3 might make things interesting. You could imagine the dominant party's candidates finishing 1st and 4th, for instance, resulting in the minority party having more representation than the majority.

If the party finishing 2nd and 3rd had more votes than the party finishing 1st and 4th, they wouldn't be the minority party. I find it more likely that the 3rd and 4th places would be taken by third parties, and you'd have something like this:

1st: Republican

2nd: Democrat

3rd: Green

4th: Libertarian

...in which case the Dems would be the minority party, but the left in general would still hold a majority of the votes (assuming 2nd + 3rd > 1st + 4th).

Why encourage those who cannot prioritize making their minds up against a common enemy? Effectively, this scheme looks to empower any majority no matter how comprised. Clarity of purpose should matter.

The funny thing about "should" statements is that we get to disagree on them without justification. I see no reason clarity of purpose across multiple humans should matter, nor any reason that people should be corralled into picking between two corrupt options.

Clarity allows governance. Otherwise we're just reacting.

If I may offer my opinion as an outsider from the EU: something like this may actually open up the traditional Left vs Right spectrum to something that is more closely resembles the existing diversity of opinions and values. For instance, here in Germany, these days coalitions between 2-3 parties is the rule rather than the exception. An interesting side effect of this has been that issues which at any given time were not the focus of the major parties can still be addressed by the smaller (often junior) party of the ruling coalition, e.g. the Green party who pushed the topic of environmental protection as a junior coalition member already in the late 90s/early 2000s.

Not true. The top vote getter might siphon off enough votes from their party's second place finisher that it drops them to fourth overall. Some of the voters will have "wasted" their vote on the party leader who would've been elected anyway even if they voted for the next highest party candidate. Think of two parties splitting the vote 60/40 overall. One party's votes are split 45/15, the other's 20/20. In a "top 3" scenario, the minority party gets two spots to the majority party's one.

There's the cubed-root rule that is pretty sensible, where representation is related to the cubed root of the population. From 2010 census there would be 676 representatives

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_root_rule

What exactly is the manageability problems you foresee? 562 seems kind of a pointless change which doesn't address any of the named issues. The first paragraph:

> The framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights intended that the total population of Congressional districts never exceed 50 to 60 thousand. Currently, the average population size of the districts is nearly 700,000 and, consequently, the principle of proportionally equitable representation has been abandoned.

I don't think adding 100-odd representatives would do much to fix the problem, which is essentially that the individual vote has been devalued by an order of magnitude. With modern technology, it might not be so difficult to manage thousands of representatives. It would be a huge change, though, and if we're making changes at that scale, a constitutional convention is probably in order.

"The individual vote has been devalued by an order of magnitude." Well, that's true, if you think about an individual voting for a representative. But what do representatives do? They vote in the House. And no matter how you slice it, you can't make each individual's vote matter more in the House. If it matters more in electing a representative, then there are more representatives, and each representative's vote matters less in the House.

Look at it from the candidate's perspective: the more voters they represent, the less any individual voter's opinion matters to them. Very similar to the utility of money, the more you have, the less a dollar is worth to you. And the less the individual voter matters, the more monied special interests matter. Money in politics is always a problem, but it's multiplied by the devaluation of the individual voter.

Fair point. And perhaps one additional step: The more voters they have, the more money they need for the campaign.

> and would make the electoral college much more fair and balanced as originally intended.

That was not originally intended, in addition to not trusting the people to directly elect leaders the electoral college was intended to give smaller states more power than they would have as a result of their population size alone. This was part of the deal, and it made the union agreeable to smaller states. If you wanna back out of the deal, it seems only fair to give any states that want to a chance to back out of the union.

What were the population differences between the small and large states back then compared to now?

>the electoral college was intended to give smaller states more power than they would have as a result of their population size alone.

Thanks to the 3/5's compromise...

The Three Fifths Compromise had nothing to do with the Electoral College. Slave states gained more power in the Electoral College from the extra 3/5 votes, but a) the compromise itself had nothing to do with the Electoral College's creation or design, and b) 3/5 of a vote gave less power to slave states than their preference, a full vote for each slave.

>the compromise itself had nothing to do with the Electoral College's creation or design

Then what were they compromising on? The formation and continuation of the US Government. Without the compromise there is no Electoral College.

That's not true at all. The 3/5s compromise affected the resulting balance of power, but the system itself was about preventing any one state from dominating the federal government. (New York was the concern at the time.)

Even if slavery didn't exist, the small state / big state dynamic still required a mechanism to balance the voting power between states. (This is often referred to as the Connecticut compromise.)

Would you have preferred 0/5ths or 5/5ths?

I'd have preferred we not have slaves.

I'd also have preferred no slaves.

But "0/5ths" for slaves would have been consistent with them being slaves. It's not like they were 60% free.

Why is 6,300 unamanagable? >500 and 6,300 both cross over the Dunbar number threshold. (interestingly, the per-party size in the US House of Reps is about the upper limit of the Dunbar number, 2 x 250 ~= 500)

6,300 is manageable with modern technology; the capabilities are there to organise and make transparent large public voting system for thousands of politicians that would have been impractical even as recently as the 60s.

It's not the voting (which has been possible for millions of people, for ages). It's the horse-trading to figure out what to put to a vote, or ideally to find the right compromises. Surely that's the point of having few enough people that many can know each other.

Just think of the filibusters with thousands of representatives...

There is no filibuster rule in the House.

We are in the modern era of electronic communication. 435 or 6,300 makes little difference, but it does make a big difference in term of representation, making it more likely you know the congressman or his family from personal interactions in your community. This lessens the need to rely on campaigns ads and campaign money to run expensive campaigns that sell your soul.

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