This is mainly because Congress will not increase the size of the House of Representatives. If we were to give Wyoming a single representative and used that as the bar for how many citizens a representative should actually represent then California would have 82 members in the House instead of 53. California would be worth 84 points in the Electoral College while Wyoming would still only be worth 3.
That would result in Wyoming congressmen having less than 2,000 constituents each, while Californian congressmen would have over 127,000 each. Wyoming voters would have about 65x as much power as California voters in the house.
In many cases California and New York voters count much less than in smaller, more rural states. The senators from Wyoming represent about 300,000 people each. The senators in California represent nearly 19,000,000 each. And the The Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 capped the number in the House of Representatives. In this case, each California House member represents three times as many people as the House members in Wyoming. That's also one reason in recent presidential elections the electoral college which is based on the number of Senators and House of Representatives (plus 3 from DC) have won the race but lost the popular vote.
Increasing the number of Representatives would dilute the "Wyoming has 2 Senators" effect on the Electoral College, and it would allow fairer representation in states like Colorado. Denver is under represented, while the Western Slope district includes Pueblo, which has been an uneasy situation.
California has 53 representatives for 38.8 million people or 1 per 730,000 people. Wyoming has 1 representative for 584,000 people. So Wyoming is over-represented in the House as well.
Checks and balances. Wyoming has 1 representative in the house, California has 53. When you combine the house and the senate, it should (in theory) be much harder for a bill to pass without approval of both the majority of the states and the majority of the population.
Wyoming, and any state rounded up to 1 representative, is special. Aside from that the effect is minor.
There is an effect going the other direction that benefits California, and in fact is why there is a fight going on at the Supreme Court. Voters in those rural states are underrepresented due to non-citizens being counted to apportion the representatives. California has something like a couple dozen extra representatives from that.
The Wyoming Rule (i.e no District should be larger than the the least populous State AKA Wyoming) would put the US House at about 850-860 Representatives
Even when they are, that doesn't mean the people electing them have equal power. The 40,000,000 people of California elect two senators. The 500,000 people of Wyoming also elect two senators. A person in Wyoming literally has 80 times as much influence over the Senate as a person in California.
And even in the House, where at least some effort is made to scale the number of representatives by population, California has only 53 representatives to Wyoming's 1, which still means each Wyoming resident has 1.5 times as much influence over the House as each California resident.
The cap on the size of the House should be lifted, so that an approximately equal number of people are represented by each representative, no matter what state you live in. I don't see the problem in both California and Wyoming getting two senators, since that's (as you mention) precisely the point of the Senate.
It's very deliberately built in to the American political system that the will of the half-plus-one majority does not dictate the direction of the whole country. If anything, the ever-increasing Federalization of laws and policies is the real problem: Californians living like Californians is fine, and Wyomingites living like Wyomingites is also fine, but there is a problem when one tries to make the other live more like them.
Let's have fifty vibrant laboratories of democracy.
> how many presidential elections we can go where the "winner" receives fewer votes than the "loser" before people seriously question what the purpose of our democracy is.
I'm already questioning that myself, considering roughly half of all eligible voters don't even bother to show up for presidential elections -- let alone midterms, which is more like two thirds. If we consider that chunk that does not vote as being OK with the status quo, then I think we have a lot of room left before American democracy is really imperiled.
I wish I knew, but one thing that should be fixed in the US is the Electoral College. The limit of 435 Reps skews the numbers.
House of Representatives is suppose to be 1 Rep per a fixed number of people. But Congress put a hard limit of 435, that means Small States have more people per Rep than Large States.
For example, Wyoming has 1 Rep for 480900 people.
California has 1 rep per 736000 people. To be fair and agree with the original intent of the US Constitution, California should have about 82 Reps instead of 53.
Texas for that matter should really have 52 Reps instead of 36 has it as now. The way it is now it has one rep per 700279 people.
This will even out things a bit and hopefully get come changes through.
The issue is not with the Electoral College, but with the artificial limit on the House of Representatives. The limit of 435 Reps skews the numbers.
House of Representatives is suppose to be 1 Rep per a fixed number of people. But Congress put a hard limit of 435, that means Small States have more people per Rep than Large States.
For example, Wyoming has 1 Rep for 480900 people.
California has 1 rep per 736000 people. To be fair and agree with the original intent of the US Constitution, California should have about 82 Reps instead of 53.
Texas for that matter should really have 52 Reps instead of 36 as it as now. The way it is now it has one rep per 700279 people.
Doesn't work that way. Wyoming has as much power in the Senate as California, even though it's got a lot fewer people. So, effectively, a single Wyoming voter has a lot more power than a single California voter.
In a true democracy, one person's vote would count just as much as another's. That's not the way it works now.
>With the compromise constitutional ratio (1:30,000) in mind and given that the U.S. Census Bureau reports that there are currently about 313.9 million inhabitants of the United States, if the Constitution were being followed, there would be approximately 10,463 members of the House of Representatives.
I'd be okay with this. It would really change the make up of our government. Senators would seem far more powerful in comparison.
The electoral college would be completely different as well. Using the population data on Wikipedia, at 1:30,000 California would have 1309 representatives and Wyoming would have 20. That would mean in the electoral college California would be worth 1311 points and Wyoming 22 vs 55 and 3 today.
The issue is not with the Electoral College, but with the artificial limit on the House of Representatives. The limit of 435 Reps skews the numbers.
House of Representatives is suppose to be 1 Rep per a fixed number of people. But Congress put a hard limit of 435, that means Small States have more people per Rep than Large States.
For example, Wyoming has 1 Rep for 480900 people.
California has 1 rep per 736000 people. To be fair and agree with the original intent of the US Constitution, California should have about 82 Reps instead of 53.
Texas for that matter should really have 52 Reps instead of 36 has it as now. The way it is now it has one rep per 700279 people.
Wyoming (the least-populous state) has .183% of the US population, so it should have .183% of the US House seats if they were fully proportional. It actually has .230% (1 / 435)--about 1.25× the power it should have. Rhode Island getting two House seats gives it about 1.34× the power it should have. Montana having only one seat leaves it at about 0.673× the power it ought to have.
As quantization errors go, the House's quantization isn't terribly distortive.
You are right that Vermont and Wyoming are even more ridiculously over represented than DC would be.
I may be biased as a Californian, but I don't see why a person from Wyoming should have 25% more representation in the House and 6500% more representation in the Senate.
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