Flipping House votes with apportionment data
How changing the method for seat apportionment in the House would reshape voting.
Background
Representation is a contentious subject. The U.S. Congress tries to balance the representation of each state across it’s two chambers: the Senate, where each state gets equal representation, and the House of Representatives, where each state gets a voice proportional to its population.
But that’s where things get harder. Based on the last census there are 331.9MM people in the U.S., of which 11.823% reside in California. Unfortunately, 11.823% of the 435 total seats in the House assigns 51.43 representatives to California. What should do with the extra 0.43 of a person?
No matter which algorithm is used to resolve this, clearly some states will end up underrepresented, and some overrepresented. In recent articles, we examined the impacts of the algorithm used to assign members to the US House of Representatives (“apportionment”). In particular, we found that:
- Delaware has been the most consistently underrepresented state over the past 60 years. It’s ranking in the state populations has created a population ranking trap that has consistently delivered fewer representatives than the fair value.
- If 25 people had moved from Minnesota to the rest…
