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Four-hundred Thirty-Five Representatives Can Not Represent 300M Americans
- bkanber 7y agoI've often felt this way myself. Representatives should be more local, and should really know their constituents so that they can represent them. I wonder how it would work in practice, though. That's a lot of Representatives to manage.
- jay_kyburz 7y agoI also wonder what it would be like to give more power to the states, and strip power from federal government so the states can have more power to manage themselves.
- jccalhoun 7y agoI think the European Union is a lot closer to what the founders imagined than the current situation in the USA.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoIn the UK at least, that's not really how it happens. Representatives in a representative democracy are representatives in name only, they're the "chosen voter" for that constituency (in parliamentary votes), but usually they're voted in because they represent a particular party and we have first part the post. Their representation of the constituents is tenuous; and often only extends to doing enough to get elected. Such a system can work well: some MPs are noble, forthright people, genuinely working for a better society. Plenty are just in it for themselves and private interests so far as I can tell, and happy to pay off the electorate with promises of milk & honey, better services and simultaneously low taxation. Before Brexit I was very much for a more direct democracy, but honestly it seems that too many voters won't put in the work needed to wade through the mire of misinformation; really they are voting for three benefit of themselves only; or just lack the intellect to properly address the complex issues. Until we get lobbyists and politicians locked up for lying, or purposeful misrepresentation then things can't improve. That all said I still think something like the Swiss system (other places have similar) whereby referenda can be triggered by the people without backing of "representatives" is necessary. Also, greater reflection of the breadth of the population through proportional representation is essential (but because it weakens the power base of those already in power is very hard to achieve).
- SubiculumCode 7y agoIf it was 1 rep per 30k then you've likely met him, went to school with him or his kids. Campaign money becomes less important, relationship to the community becomes more important.
- Finnucane 7y agoThe biggest problem with a fixed number of representatives is unequal representation. Even a relatively small increase i the number of representatives could even things out substantially (and this affects the electoral college as well.
- SubiculumCode 7y agoI think the biggest problem is that thr representative becomes a remote entity that you know mostly from campaign ads and not as a member of your local community.
- brenden2 7y agoI generally agree with the premise, but I disagree that any form of representative government is a good idea. Direct democracy is the only real democracy, and there's no good reason why we don't have 100% direct democracy in 2019 aside from the fact that a bunch of wannabe celebs would lose their jobs (aka politicians). Politics is mostly about self service, and boosting your own ego and influence. Politicians have historically not voted on legislation in ways that are aligned with their constituents. Instead, they vote on legislation which helps keep them in their positions of power (i.e., to appease lobbyists and campaign contributors). There's a good podcast about this very issue: https://www.npr.org/podcasts/481105292/more-perfect https://www.npr.org/podcasts/481105292/more-perfect
- jedberg 7y agoHaving worked at reddit, I can tell you first hand that direct democracy would never work. Imagine all of the low information voters you know being asked to vote on complex technical issues that even most representatives can't grasp, most of whom have completed many years of post-graduate college. Direct democracy is great in theory but the representative part play an important role in balancing the flighty whims of the masses with reality.
- blacksqr 7y agoIt's insane that the Democrats didn't significantly increase the size of the House in 2009, when they had a filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate. It probably would have given them a lock on the House, and the presidency too in close elections such as 2016.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoTheir corporate donors don't want power concentrated into the hands of cityfolk with too much of a social conscience.
- codingslave 7y agoThis is the kind of thing that happens in third world countries and leads to violent riots. When politicians use their majority power to block out any kind of power for another party, its anti democratic and dangerous.
- vkou 7y agoIt's anti-democratic to have some votes count for more than others, which is what the status quo is. Also, blatant gerrymandering (Which is a far more anti-democratic version of this phenomena) has been heavily practiced in the US for many, many decades, and has, to my knowledge never resulted in bloody riots in the streets. [1] [1] Most recently, the Supreme Court has ruled[2] that if you're not happy with how your government gerrymanders, you should vote it out. It's a wonderfully ironic non-solution... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gill_v._Whitford https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gill_v._Whitford
- codingslave 7y agoOne of the basic tenets of the founding fathers was that small groups can have out sized power. A flaw in democracy is when some group gets a majority vote and only votes for their own self interest (see Plato). States rights and the phenomenon of some small states having large sway in elections was originally intended to stop highly populated cities from dominating the rural plantation/farming states way back when. We continue to see this now, California is left partly because of the huge amount of international immigration it has seen in the last 50 years. I want to emphasize that I am not anti immigration, I am just pointing out that it has a massive effect on the future of elections, and ignoring this effect is intellectually dishonest. Using electoral college as a voting system acts as an aqueduct from any one area completely dominating the national voting. Without the electoral college, all the left would need to do (which they are trying to do now), is to flood California with poor people from mexico, and then capture their children's votes/their votes in national elections. We will still see this play out in 20 or 30 years, but the system so far has stopped anti democratic attacks like this
- mindcrime 7y agoTransition to self-government. https://theadvocates.org/ https://theadvocates.org/
- jedberg 7y agoI like the premise, but I don't think 6,300 representatives makes a lot of sense. I like the proposed "Wyoming" rule. That each representative will represent no more than the population of the smallest state. Today that would mean about 562 reps, which is manageable, in line with most of the other major world democracies, and would make the electoral college much more fair and balanced as originally intended.
- elihu 7y agoAnother option is to let each state have as few or as many representatives as they want, but instead of going with one vote per representative, you weight the votes by the number of citizens that representative represents. You could even go one step further and allow the top two or three vote-getters from each district to have a seat in the House, but their voting power is weighted by the number of votes they got.
- gaogao 7y agoHopefully a number within reason. I could see some states protesting congressional salaries by having thousands of representatives.
- vannevar 7y agoI like the idea of weighted representation, though I think you'd have to take at least the top two to avoid disenfranchising a significant fraction of the population under a winner-take-all approach, given our two-party politics. Taking the top 3 might make things interesting. You could imagine the dominant party's candidates finishing 1st and 4th, for instance, resulting in the minority party having more representation than the majority.
- rsmckinney 7y ago...unless they elect your candidate.
- elihu 7y agoA problem with having a large number of seats in the House is that there's no way everyone with something to say on any particular topic is going to be able to say it in an in-person physical meeting. In other words, meetings don't scale, and the problem would get worse if you added seats. An alternative to live meetings is to move any procedures involving the full House to a web-based medium, similar to HN. Policy discussions can happen in comment threads. Representatives can travel to DC for committee meetings, but otherwise they can stay in their districts where the constituents they are representing actual live, and comment and cast votes online. Any representative can introduce a bill, and they can be passed quickly if they have the votes without a whole lot of procedural scheduling nonsense.
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- debatem1 7y agoI've never understood why legislatures don't move to something more like modern code review. It would have to dramatically simplify their lives.
- gremlinsinc 7y agoI'd love this. Imagine if you could also commit incremental changes, so if someone pushes a 'pork bill' you could push changes to pull out some of the pork and 'trim the fat' so to speak. You can have the defense of women act without making prisons worse for minorities by pushing changes.
- debatem1 7y agoI mean, I think you'd still need someone with commit rights to actually push the change (presumably our elected officials), and you would need to have some way of tracking merges well, but that's all seemingly pretty solvable.
- gremlinsinc 7y ago
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago> The framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights intended that the total population of Congressional districts never exceed 50 to 60 thousand. Currently, the average population size of the districts is nearly 700,000 and, consequently, the principle of proportionally equitable representation has been abandoned. Non sequitur, and in the first paragraph. I mean, yes, if we had more districts, you could get closer to exactly equal population per representative, but a difference of a factor of two in a few districts is not an "abandonment" of the principle. It's the principle not working perfectly, which is perhaps not ideal, but is far less end-of-our-democracy than this tries to make it sound. And if we did expand the House to 6,000 members, what would we get? We'd get 1000 self-important committees, or we'd get more members per committee, or both. Can you imagine the impeachment hearings if the committee had 500 members, each demanding their 5 minutes to grandstand with each witness?
- csallen 7y ago> Can you imagine the impeachment hearings if the committee had 500 members, each demanding their 5 minutes to grandstand with each witness? You have to assume that if you changed the size of the committees, their behavior would change, too.
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoThat's one possible outcome, yes. It is not the only one. I'm not even sure it's the one I would assume would happen.
- iguy 7y agoRight, a house of 6000 can't discuss anything. Isn't the obvious answer to devolve more powers? Decide fewer things federally, and let states (or perhaps there should even be formalised voluntary groups of states?) diverge more in their approaches?
- FussyZeus 7y ago> Right, a house of 6000 can't discuss anything. Perhaps not in the ceremony-heavy, grandstanding inviting format we currently use, but that sounds more like a problem that lies with the format, not the size of the governing body.
- kej 7y agoAs a random bit of trivia, while George Washington presided over the Constitutional Convention, this was the only issue on which he expressed an opinion, in favor of lowering the original ratio from 1:40k to 1:30k.
- rolltiide 7y agosolution: 9,500 representatives, lol.... I also don't take dissenting opinions from a 1920s Missouri representative seriously or that Geocities website but in the spirit of not immediately discrediting the sources or ad hominem attacks, it does at least makes me wonder if the 435 cap was arbitrary and capricious
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoDoes representative democracy break down at some point? What happens when America has 1B people? At some point, you can't fit enough people into a chamber usefully. What do we do then?
- gremlinsinc 7y agoDid you read the whole thing? You can't fit 6000 in a chamber... The idea is that reps stay local. Don't go to washington. Thus it makes D.C. less of a national security target. I could work for FB or Google remotely as a developer, why can't our reps work remotely? It'd even allow people w/ full-time jobs like developers to run for office if it was more a part-time thing because they didn't need a presence in Washington. If they had a platform like reddit where members could weigh in on bills by 'channel' and have discussion online -- they could do 95% of their jobs remotely maybe even 100%. They may need to travel for small things but that's a non-issue.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoI'm not sure anybody would suggest that, who's had to negotiate via online chat etc. Its a terrible medium, lacking completely in persuasive body language, intonation, physical signaling etc. Politicians are professional persuaders. I'm sure very few would think this is a could idea.
- gremlinsinc 7y agoThat's the point if we increased to 6000 members, it would be more 'normal' people running the country, and less about persuasion. It shouldn't even be about politicians/persuasion. It should be about getting a fucking job done that helps people, not gets their 'pet' project accomplished because 'narcissism'. How do you think narcissistic persuasion is good for government? Have you looked at how far mired in shit we are? Why people are so afraid of change when ANYTHING is better than what we're currently dealing with in Washington. The entire system is one fucked up Republic just waiting for the fate of Rome to befall it. If it's not already too late. We've already lost our place as the #1 country in the world on SO many levels where it really matters: Education, Healthcare, Freedom, Journalistic Integrity, Propaganda, Human Services, etc...
- raymondsoldier 7y agoWhat if I don't want to be governed and represented by anybody? Do I have to pay for something I don't agree on through taxes? Can I be arrested, harmed and have my property taken away from me by simply disagreeing?
- wdn 7y agoMore representatives is not the solution. They are already paying too much. We don’t need have more so they come up with new ideas to spend more money. The solution is keep representatives local. At the age of internet, there is no reason why they need to be in DC to allow lobbyists to access all of them in 1 place.
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- Consultant32452 7y agoI don't understand this focus on the House. If we accept the axiom that 435 representatives can't represent 300M Americans, what are we supposed to think of 100 Senators? The federal government was never supposed to be this important. Four-hundred thirty-five representatives only have a hand full of responsibilities outlined in the Constitution. Somehow though they're concerned about who I'm married to and what I grow in my garden. The obvious solution is not to expand representatives, but to push power down to the local level where it belongs.
- gremlinsinc 7y agoI feel the senate shouldn't be state based but grid based. Split the country into 300 equal-size-squares. Each square gets a senator.
- SubiculumCode 7y agoSenators dont represent people, they represent States. More States, more Senators. The same rule should apply to the house. More people, more representatives.
- throwawaysea 7y agoMore representatives would mean more precise representation, since otherwise local tyrannies of majorities can drown out some viewpoints entirely. For example, if each congressional district has 55% of people with one view and 45% with another view on some controversial topic, it is possible that only the winning 55% view is represented in Congress because every district is won by a representative who advocates for the majority view. With more representation and finer-grained districting, the likelihood of those other 45% of constituents feeling disenfranchised is reduced. We may end up with something closer to 55-45 representation of this hypothetical issue in Congress, instead of 100-0. Furthermore, it is a lot harder/more expensive to lobby (or bribe) thousands of representatives versus a few hundred. It is harder for unethical activity to be undertaken without scrutiny. While we're at it, let's also have runoff voting of some sort and get closer to issue-based voting rather than coalition/party-based tribalism. As for those calling out the downsides of a direct democracy and exposure to uninformed voters - I would say we are already exposed to the risks of uninformed voters, and we are also exposed to all sorts of expensive political gamesmanship. To me it feels like our current democratic process (in the US anyways) is more of a popularity contest reflecting who has the biggest expenditure of [time/effort/money] and strongest populist ground game.
- JshWright 7y agoI assume this is showing up on HN because of the recent CGP Grey "footnote" video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JN4RI7nkes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JN4RI7nkes
- robbrown451 7y agoI personally don't think the problem is "lack of representation", it is that the representatives are far more beholden to their party than to the members of the district. This isn't solved by having more representatives. It could best be solved by having a voting method that actually elects the "consensus candidate", which I would define as the first choice of the median voter. As it is, Duverger's law forces it into a binary choice. (Parties arise mostly as a defense against the vote splitting that happens in plurality, and it inevitably converges on two dominant parties)
- SubiculumCode 7y agoExactly. They are more beholden to the party because they need lots of campaign money to run a big campaign in a big district. Compare that to a campaign the size of small town city council...you probably met them at your kid's school or on the playground while growing up.
- robbrown451 7y agoYes, well money is a big part of it but not all if it. The forcing into two parties, two binary choices, left or right, is such a solvable problem.
- kryptiskt 7y agoThis wouldn't work, or rather, it would work quite differently than the idea. This would just create a new level of middle managers in the house tasked with herding the foot soldiers. There are only so many hours that they can be in session or in committees, an ordinary representative will be lucky to get the microphone for a minute here and there. And there is no way the party's leadership can give them all individual time and attention. So there will naturally arise a management level or two between the leadership and the ordinary representatives to bridge this gap.
- Monroe13 7y agoPerfect! It breaks the stranglehold of party leadership. With the Freedom Caucus, we've seen what that a relatively small (approx. 30 members) coalition can buck leadership and drive their own agenda. If you expand Congress, I'd guess the likelihood of these coalitions increases (for better or worse).
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoIf you regard that as "breaking the stranglehold of party leadership", I don't think you understood kryptiskt's comment. The point (as I understood it) was that it strengthens the party leadership over the bulk of the members.
- undersuit 7y agoMy proposition has been take all the support staff of Congress and convert them to Representatives(by firing them, yes). It works out very close to the ~60k citizens per House Representative. My idealistic vision is that this will force the representatives to work together to create our laws. Before the American Civil War, members of Congress did not have staff assistance or even offices, and "most members worked at their desks on the floor." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_staff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_staff
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- jdlyga 7y agoOur representation system is pretty messed up. Montana has 2 senators with a population of 577,000. But New York state has 2 senators with a population of 19.5 million. And the entire midwest is like that, with tons of representation for very sparely populated areas.
- Monroe13 7y agoMontana has a population of more than 1 million. And two senators per state regardless of population is a feature not a bug.
- jshaqaw 7y agoCoordinating 435 people to get meaningful work done is really hard. Coordinating 30k would just transfer even more power to centralized coordinating structures like the parties without any corresponding increase in democratic representation. Next...