House Seats are reallocated based on population after each census. There’s even an algorithm for it.
The real problem is that the size of the House has been fixed. It didn’t use to be this way. They used to add seats after each census, but about 100 years ago they couldn’t agree on how to add them, so they stopped, and the size of the House has been fixed since then.
So while the average district size is now around 750k, the smallest districts are in states like Rhode Island, where the population is in the 500k range, and they still get one House member. (But not all small states benefit: the largest district is Delaware’s lone district, which has over 900k people in it but is not large enough to split in two yet.)
I bet if they had kept adding, there might be 575 or so members , with an average district size below 600k.
“roughly” doing some heavy lifting in that sentence despite the parentheses
A Wyomian has 80 times a Californians say in the presidential election.
I was going to insult Wyomians here but none of them would even read it.
I thought it was something like 6x? Still ridiculous.
House Seats are reallocated based on population after each census. There’s even an algorithm for it.
The real problem is that the size of the House has been fixed. It didn’t use to be this way. They used to add seats after each census, but about 100 years ago they couldn’t agree on how to add them, so they stopped, and the size of the House has been fixed since then.
So while the average district size is now around 750k, the smallest districts are in states like Rhode Island, where the population is in the 500k range, and they still get one House member. (But not all small states benefit: the largest district is Delaware’s lone district, which has over 900k people in it but is not large enough to split in two yet.)
I bet if they had kept adding, there might be 575 or so members , with an average district size below 600k.