The idea behind doing that was so that the people in Hickle Dickle have their needs heard as much as the people from New Franciscago. Why? Because small towns have different needs than big cities, and it’s important to hear from the people living in each area.
However it absolutely needs an overhaul as A) the population difference between New Franciscago and Hickle Dickle have become obscene (you’re talking 30m vs 1m, when the reality is closer to 30m vs 100,000 or less), and B) the electoral college is becoming weaponized to override New Franciscago when it was supposed to balance the two and make sure Hickle Dickle still has its needs met.
The real problem happened in 1929 when Congressional apportionment was set at 435. Congress regularly increased in size before then. The population has more than doubled since 1930, yet the overall number of representatives hasn’t changed, which means each district gets bigger.
There are 990K people in the largest district by population currently, with 545k in the smallest. (Plot twist: that large district is actually Delaware, which still has only one district, somehow)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_congressional_districts
I have been saying this for years. The Senate is supposed to be where small states get an outsized voice, but by freezing the size of the House, small states have been getting an outsized voice in both houses on Congress and they’ve been getting a disproportionately high number of electors in the Electoral College.
Based on the 2020 census, Wyoming is the least populous state at 576,851 people. If that were used as the smallest number of people that could be in a district, the US’s total population of 335,073,176 would be divided into 580 congressional districts. Over a third of the population is being underrepresented because the House hasn’t added seats in almost 100 years.
Also we need to go back to giving the Senate back to state legislatures to appoint. By making it another smaller house, we have two places where the “Mob” can control instead of one chamber controlled by the people with another chamber controlled by the states.
State legislatures have had a diminished presence in state elections since the direct election of Senators. Also it would Remove the money from Senate reelection PAC’s, which is a win in my book.
Plot twist: that large district is actually Delaware, which still has only one district, somehow)
Because of the method used to calculate apportionment. It’s mathematically designed to assign each representative in a way that minimizes the average difference in population/representative.
It’s actually very good at doing that, it’s just that a few states are very small and still get the minimum one House Rep and two Senators and four are so big they blow the curve on the other end.
Frankly, we’d be better off in general if we merged some of the states that get one or two House Reps. We really only need one Dakota, for example.
The idea behind doing that was so that the people in Hickle Dickle have their needs heard as much as the people from New Franciscago.
No, not really. The actual idea behind the Electoral College (and Senators prior to the 17th Amendment) was so the state Hickle Dickle is in, collectively as a sovereign unit could have its needs heard, as expressed by its state legislature. It was basically intended to work like a parliamentary system (where the prime minister is chosen by members of parliament themselves, not by vote of the public), except with the power given to each of the state legislatures instead of Congress, for enhanced Federalism/separation of powers.
Electors don’t exist to change the balance the power between urban and rural; that’s a side-effect. Their real purpose is to compensate for the fact that different states have different legislative structures [for example: Nebraska is unicameral!] with wildly different ratios of constituents per legislator. They couldn’t do “one legislator, one vote” and have it be fair (read: normalized by population across states), so they did the next best thing and gave each state’s legislature a number of elector slots equal to that state’s representation in Congress, and let them choose people to fill those slots however they wanted.
People think the Electoral College and the Senate don’t work right, and that’s because they really don’t. But that’s not because they were designed poorly for what they were intended to do (limit “mob rule” and provide a voice for States as sovereign entities/the middle layer in the federalist separation of powers), but because we’ve subsequently fucked them up by bolting half-assed attempts at direct democracy to them in the form of the 17th Amendment, the Reapportionment Act of 1929, and state legislators abdicating their power to appoint electors and choosing them by statewide popular vote instead.
At this point, IMO, either implementing direct democracy properly (abolishing the Electoral College and the Senate) or going back to the original design would be an improvement over the broken status quo!
