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Comment by loumf | Hacker News Reader

Another -- also "never going to happen" solution is to just grow the House. It used to grow with population and then we stopped. If districts were smaller, it would be easier to make them less gerrymandered and pseudo-proportional representation falls out as a side-effect.

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I completely agree - I think capping the size of the House was one of the worst things that ever happened in terms of getting effective representation.

And with modern tech, there's no reason not to, even if it means the House of Reps needs a new building. In fact, I'd suggest that they get one, but that we build it in Wyoming, Kansas, Colorado, or Nebraska.

> If districts were smaller, it would be easier to make them less gerrymandered and pseudo-proportional representation falls out as a side-effect.

Until you get very close to the limit case of 1 voter per district, more districts doesn't really reduce the opportunity for gerrymandering.

Simply using a candidate-centered election system which produces proportional results in multimember districts neatly eliminates the benefits of gerrymandering.

At this point they may need to use RFK stadium for floor votes, if we were for example to return to the population density per rep that existed before the growth stopped. Using Wikipedia's numbers, we'd have just over 1,050 reps if we used the same density as 1929 when it was capped.

And, at roughly original numbers, ~7,400 representatives.

That's a lot of people to filibuster.

Fortunately the House doesn't have filibusters anymore.

But we have the internet now. They don't need to all meet in the same room anymore.

Having more of them would also make it more difficult to buy votes.

For more on this idea see this article by George Kenney: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0120-08.htm

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