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Could Removing the House Seat Limit Solve the Electoral College Problem? [1]
['Claire Carlson', 'The Daily Yonder']
Date: 2024-02-07
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in Keep It Rural, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Like what you see? Join the mailing list for more rural news, thoughts, and analysis in your inbox each week.
The United States government is built on a rather archaic voting structure.
The Founding Fathers created the Electoral College more than 200 years ago (although it was not called the Electoral College then) to balance votes for a presidential candidate between a vote in Congress and a popular vote by the people (of course, in the 1700s the people given that right were property-owning white men, but I digress…)
This balance was meant to give the smallest states a say in the presidency, but 200 plus years later, this structure is in desperate need of reform now that the U.S. is about 100 times the size it was when the Founding Fathers first created it. Critics of the Electoral College say low-population states have outsized influence on who becomes president.
As the Electoral College operates now, states are given a certain number of electoral votes based on how many representatives they have, plus two votes for the two senators each state is given. The number of representatives is based on the state’s population size.
The House of Representatives is capped at 435 seats, a rather arbitrary number based on a 1929 law that was meant to resolve rural and urban disagreements over apportionment (the process to assign seats to each state).
But by capping the number of representatives, large swaths of the U.S. population go underrepresented. Former-President George Washington once proposed one representative for every 30,000 people, which if you did the math today would mean about 11,000 representatives for the 331.9 million people living in the United States.
Instead of adding a seat if a state’s population grows, a seat can only be added by taking it from another state through reapportionment. In this system, a state always loses representation.
This happened in 2021 when California lost a House seat for the first time ever, even though it still is home to about 12% of the total U.S. population. Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia also lost seats in 2021.
The needs of urban and rural communities are obscured by this system where some states have just one congressperson representing three-quarters-of-a-million people, like Florida where the state’s 28 representatives serve 778,000 people each. The needs of hundreds of thousands of people simply can’t be served by one person. And, contrary to what you might assume, many states with high representative-to-constituent ratios contain rural communities, like Pennsylvania where more than a quarter of the state’s 13 million residents live in rural counties as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau.
There have been many efforts to increase the number of House seats or get rid of the 435-seat-cap completely. Two bills introduced last year by Representative Sean Casten from Illinois and Representative Earl Blumenauer from Oregon offer two possible solutions.
The first, from Representative Casten, would add approximately 138 House seats and establish 12 “at-large senators” to be elected by a ranked-choice vote, which allows voters to rank their choices by preference. With this system, even if a voter’s first choice does not win the majority, their second or third choices could still count.
The second possible option from Representative Blumenauer would restore the number of House seats lost by reapportionment since the 1929 law that put a limit on House seats, bringing the number of representatives to 585. In each subsequent census, the number of representatives would be adjusted to reflect population growth.
Both of these bills were introduced early last year, and like many pieces of legislation, are languishing in the House without a vote. Neither is a perfect solution, but they’re a stab at better-positioning the House to represent the diverse perspectives that 331.9 million people bring to the table.
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