Thirty Thousand argues that the US House of Representatives should be much larger so Americans are better represented.
HN commenters link it in discussions of Congress size, apportionment, and electoral reform, as a source of ideas on more diverse representation.
Your last point about the 'insane amount of individual votes' is really the whole problem.
In Europe, as I understand it, you vote for a single person and that person does the rest of the voting for your area. I'm sorry if I am wrong about that or oversimplified it; that's the current state of my knowledge on the subject.
Just so you know: America started out that way too, which is why we have the 'house of representatives'. The framers of the constitution intended that congressional districts never exceed 50K to 60K thousand. Unfortunately the average congressional district in America is currently about 700K.
Voting for someone to represent me and my closest 699,999 friends is barely a vote at all. With congressional districts that large (not to mention fcking gerrymandering) you are not really voting along with your peers. People are grouped together in strange ways.
https://thirty-thousand.org/
Also, Germany is 1/4th the size of the US and the UK is 1/5th the size of the US.
The net result is; Americans are not accurately represented at a national level.
When you combine that with the fact that we pride ourselves on our independence and individuality; taking away our ability* to cast votes on local issues is probably not going to fly. If anything I'm guessing we'd want more power to vote individually. Two of the last five presidents who were elected were not chosen by the majority of the population.
I think a simpler solution like paper ballots and many polling…
There are a few concerns about the electoral college, but I don’t consider it broken in any meaningful sense. After all, the Constitution has survived over 200 years with it in place, which makes it the longest-serving constitution in force today. We cannot say for sure that it would have survived so long under any proposed alternative.
The first issue I would aim to address is the variance in voting power from district to district. In Wyoming, voters have a significantly lower constituent to elector ratio, ie greater voting power, than those in e.g. California.
This issue is a recent development due to the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, which fixed the number of reps in the House. As the population has grown, the distance between the average population vs the minimum population of a district has increased.
The remedy is to simply uncap the size of the house and increase the number of representatives. This would quantize the population over a greater number of electors thus reducing the remainder, resulting in relatively more equivalent voter power.
As an added benefit, it would increase the amount of access each voter has to their Representative in the House, and make it practically more difficult to corrupt a majority of the House members.
https://www.reddit.com/r/UncapTheHouse/comments/lklp4h/the_uncap_the_house_starter_guide/
https://thirty-thousand.org/
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/435-representatives/
> What would the advantages of significantly increasing the number of representatives be?
Better representation, obviously. This is like asking the advantage of increasing the number of pixels on a screen.
How many average constituents per member is right? We're not going back to <50k constituents per member like the U.S. in the 1790s or Nordic countries today, but unclear why we can't get under 300k per constituent like Mexico or Australia.
We're an extreme outlier in OECD countries:
https://www.amacad.org/ourcommonpurpose/enlarging-the-house/section/7
Looking at federations instead of unitary states, Mexico has ~250k per member, about 3x better than the U.S., while Australia has under 200k per member. Germany has only a little over 100k per member.
Potential effects of better U.S. representation here: https://thirty-thousand.org
> On the other hand it's about on par with the EU parliament.
The EU is a voluntary economic union (see Brexit), the U.S. is a federation of states which may not unilaterally secede (see Texas v. White).
"The less representative the upper body of a national legislature, the greater the gap between the rich and the poor."
Interestingly enough, one of the failed amendments to the Constitution was have each member of the House of Representatives represent a max of 50,000 citizens. [1] I've wondered whether this would be a good change to our modern system where some representatives have 1m+ constituents.
I mean, how can one person accurately represent the views of so many people?
What a larger house would mean is an increase in the number of political parties as small groups of people could work to have their minority groups represented outside of a major political party.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Apportionment_Amendment
EDIT: Here's a site with some information about the idea of increasing the size of the house: http://www.thirty-thousand.org/
I think the real answer to all of this is to restore a reasonable ratio of population to representatives. It is much more difficult to Gerrymander 133 districts than with 9. It will still happen but the possible advantage one party can get is much smaller.
The constituents also get much better representation, because they are much closer to the person representing them. The representative is intimately familiar with their constituents concerns because they live in and around them.
It also strips a lot of the money out of politics. Representatives don't have to spend all their time fundraising to raise war chests of millions of dollars. You can win an election in a 30,000 person district by knocking on doors and sending out inexpensive mailers.
http://www.thirty-thousand.org/
1. The original 1787 apportionment would result in a House of Representatives of ~30k members[1].
2. That's obviously unwieldy, and so we haven't had a bump in seats since ... 1910.
3. 'Factions' were viewed dimly by the Founders. I would argue in favor of two immediate changes:
- Term limits for everything, including shorter max civil service careers. Capitol Hill, like any compost heap, benefits from regular turning.
- A "bidder bunch" rule, whereby if Congress can't manage its key function--that of producing a budget--then none of these goofs (even the ones I admire) get to run for their seat when next up. There are copious talented alternative people to put on ballots. Do your job or face corporate punishment, say I.
[1] https://thirty-thousand.org/