For those interested in the issue of an expanded House, there’s a group out there called ThirtyThousand.org that believes we should go back to what the Founders envisioned, which if I remember correctly pegged it at one representative per 50,000 people (why the group isn’t called FiftyThousand.org is beyond me): http://www.thirty-thousand.org/index.htm That would mean about 6,180 members of the House today.

I’m not going to vouch for the specifics of their plan or the people involved (simply because I’m not familiar with them, not because I know anything about any of them), but it’s an intriguing idea. I’ve also seen a proposal that the number of Representatives be fixed to whatever is the smallest number of districts with an equal (or roughly so) number of constituents. I believe the number was about 1,400 the last time I saw it, with every Congressional district having the same number of people.

Worth noting as well, of course, is that we do have a governance structure that in most cases offer representative districts with relatively small (compared to Congress) populations. They’re called state legislatures. Were the federal government to take a more modest role in the governance of our country, and the states a more significant role, the problem of overly large Congressional district populations would be substantially mitigated simply by the fact that it was far less important than who represents you in the state legislature.

Sean Parnell

President

Center for Competitive Politics

http://www.campaignfreedom.org

http://www.twitter.com/seanparnellccp

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Good numbers to see.

Montana must be frustrated that all those tourists visiting Glacier and Yellowstone can't count on any given day -- with just 11,000 more people, they get two seats, rather than only one seat despite having a population just shy of a million people (twice Wyoming's population, which also gets one seat).

Increasing the House by this number of 11 seats would mean: 1) no state house lose more than one seat; 2) Montana would get its reasonable number of two seats rather than one; 3) six states would lose seats rather than ten states; 4) we would avoid the risk of the presidential election being thrown into the House because of an Electoral College tie (as would have happened with a shift of fewer than 21,000 votes in Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico in 2004).

You'd think more Members of Congress might want to say this is at least worth a conversation. House size changed every ten years up until 1910, when it grew by more than 40 seat from 1900. Since then, our population -- and thus our average House district population -- has more than tripled (and the average electorate has grown more than six times, given that women and more racial minorities can now vote). Hats off to Congressman Alcee Hastings for introducing legislation to create a commission to study this question and the question of whether we should consider multi-seat district systems with proportional voting.

Our timidity when it comes to being open to rethinking voting methods and structure lies in stark contrast to other nations -- the United Kingdom, for example, is in the final stages of passing legislation that will reduce its number of House of Commons seats from 650 to 600 (still far more than in the US House, of course) and establish a May 2011 national referendum on adoption of instant runoff voting ("the alternative vote") for electing the House of Commons.

- Rob Richie, FairVote

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Rob Richie
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