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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

The even more crazy part is the proposed Jefferson has less than 1/10 the population of West or South California but still has a higher population than both Dakotas, Washington DC, Alaska, Vermont, or Wyoming.

West California would still be one of the most populous states in the union, coming in just behind Ohio in 7th place and South California would be nipping on its heels. Silicon Valley would be ranked near Tennessee. As crazy as this proposal sounds, it's probably less crazy than having almost 40 million people be represented by just 2 senators when Wyoming has the same number of senators for barely half a million people.

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> it's probably less crazy than having almost 40 million people be represented by just 2 senators when Wyoming has the same number of senators for barely half a million people.

This was purposely the design of the Senate. This complaint should be more applied to the House, where we stopped increasing the number of reps as population grew

The Senate was designed by crazy people.

I don’t think the founding fathers really understood how much the population of the states would diverge over the years.

I didn't have a good offhand feel for how the ratio of large to small state populations has changed, so for whatever it's worth, the ratio between the largest and smallest state at various times:

1790: 12x (Virginia : Delaware)

1850: 36x (New York : Florida)

1900: 173x (New York : Nevada)

1950: 93x (New York : Nevada)

2000: 69x (California : Wyoming)

2020: 68x (California : Wyoming)

Iirc, the least populous states in the union were about 7% (~1.5% of the national population) the population of the most populous (Virginia). Within 30 years of the constitution's ratification, Indiana was granted statehood with a population equivalent to .8% of the national population.

It's a far cry from Wyoming being ~1% the population of California (~.17% of the US pop), but I think they and the first few generations of american politicians were reasonably aware of the potential spread.

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