
Four-hundred Thirty-Five Representatives Can Not Represent 300M Americans - SubiculumCode
https://thirty-thousand.org/
======
jedberg
I 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
Another 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.

~~~
vannevar
I 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.

~~~
blotter_paper
If the party finishing 2nd and 3rd had more votes than the party finishing 1st
and 4th, they wouldn't be the minority party. I find it more likely that the
3rd and 4th places would be taken by third parties, and you'd have something
like this:

1st: Republican

2nd: Democrat

3rd: Green

4th: Libertarian

...in which case the Dems would be the minority _party_ , but the left in
general would still hold a majority of the votes (assuming 2nd + 3rd > 1st +
4th).

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RhysU
Why encourage those who cannot prioritize making their minds up against a
common enemy? Effectively, this scheme looks to empower any majority no matter
how comprised. Clarity of purpose should matter.

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blotter_paper
The funny thing about "should" statements is that we get to disagree on them
without justification. I see no reason clarity of purpose across multiple
humans should matter, nor any reason that people should be corralled into
picking between two corrupt options.

~~~
RhysU
Clarity allows governance. Otherwise we're just reacting.

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AnimalMuppet
> 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?

~~~
iguy
Right, 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
> 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.

~~~
iguy
Well what's your proposed new format? If it relies on humans not wishing to
grandstand, then I'm not optimistic.

If if divides up the 6000 into smaller numbers, maybe with some hierarchical
structure... then that's not one body of 6000.

A few hundred seems like the biggest room in which you can have something like
a debate. And perhaps more importantly, many of them can know each many of the
others, so that they can talk directly outside in the hallways, make deals,
figure out who will support what.

~~~
FussyZeus
I don't know. Designing governments isn't generally my forte. I'm just saying
that "we can't have more representatives because nothing will get discussed
correctly in our current format" is limiting for no real reason. It's entirely
logical if you change the size of the Governing body, you'd have to change
some other things, too.

The framers were smart enough to know their vision for the Government wouldn't
be the best forever, or even the best a few decades from when they designed
it. It was designed to be replaceable and update-able as needed.

~~~
iguy
OK, but isn't it the other way around? A re-design may be a good idea, and a
particular design may imply that you want a different size.

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blacksqr
It'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.

~~~
codingslave
This 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.

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screye
It is anti-democratic to make a democracy more representative ? What kind of
backwards logic is that.

The Democrats have ran the country like idiots, where they have repeatedly
made good faith assumptions about the republicans and been betrayed every
time.

When the system is broken, the least you do is fix it.

~~~
codingslave
We could dive into a whole political argument here. I am to add, not a
republican either, I just think both sides have massive failings and need to
be disrupted.

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kej
As 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.

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throwawaysea
More 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.

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elihu
A 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.

~~~
debatem1
I've never understood why legislatures don't move to something more like
modern code review. It would have to dramatically simplify their lives.

~~~
gremlinsinc
I'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
I 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
yeah it'd need approval by heads of committees maybe and some sort of
consensus algorithm. Then of course the bill would need implemented by the
specific departments that do those things.

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robbrown451
I 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
Exactly. 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
Yes, 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.

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Consultant32452
I 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.

~~~
SubiculumCode
Senators dont represent people, they represent States. More States, more
Senators. The same rule should apply to the house. More people, more
representatives.

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jdlyga
Our 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
Montana has a population of more than 1 million.

And two senators per state regardless of population is a feature not a bug.

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bkanber
I'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
I 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
I think the European Union is a lot closer to what the founders imagined than
the current situation in the USA.

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Finnucane
The 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
I 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.

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undersuit
My 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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JshWright
I 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)

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kryptiskt
This 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
Perfect! 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
If 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.

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rsmckinney
...unless they elect your candidate.

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jshaqaw
Coordinating 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...

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JoeAltmaier
Does 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
Did 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
I'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
Let me also add by moving things online where there isn't 'body language'
people can actually read between the lines on issues, they can have deeper
thoughts on things. Plus it's all public for the world to see the process
unfold (except in cases where it's private for security reasons). More
transparency would be a good thing.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Just think of the average online discussion. Not HN, but other fora. Its not a
pretty place. The impersonal nature of typing at each other, makes it easy to
rant and be extreme.

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rolltiide
solution: 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

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wdn
More 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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mindcrime
Transition to self-government.
[https://theadvocates.org/](https://theadvocates.org/)

------
brenden2
I 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
Having 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.

~~~
DarthGhandi
Direct democracy works well in Switzerland. It's shocking to claim that people
are simply to dumb to know what's best for them. Given the opportunity many
will educate themselves on the matter.

May as well be advocating for a benevolent dictatorship.

~~~
jedberg
Switzerland doesn’t have direct democracy. They have representatives combined
with a referendum system.

Just like California. And that system has arguably caused many problems in
California. The budget is a mess because of the referendum system. And
California has a population four times that of Switzerland.

