The United States Constitution gives Congress the responsibility for determining the number of Congressman assigned to the House of Representatives from each state and it references the use of a Census every 10 years to make that determination. This responsibility clearly has the potential for impacting the passage of bills, the approval of budgets and even the election of the President. Despite its importance, the analytics involved in determining the number of representatives, is not specified except to say that each state’s seats “shall be apportioned….according to their respective numbers” referring to each state's population.
It would seem hard to screw this up, but the process involves politicians, so it is not surprising that, over the years, the math seems tilted one direction or another. In the last cycle of the census, the outcome of the current method coincidentally matched the projected outcome of a more fair and logical method. Some might say that this means that a change is not necessary. I believe that it means that the time is right to switch because passage through Congress is less likely to be stalled for political reasons.
History Has its Eyes on You
The musical Hamilton depicts Alexander Hamilton, our nation’s first Treasury Secretary, as a patriot motivated by what was best for the country. In one scene, Hamilton enters the ‘room where it happens’ to negotiate a deal with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to promote the federalizing of the United States banking system. In the deal, Hamilton agrees to support the relocation of the capital from Philadelphia to Washington DC, a move that increased his own commute from New York while reducing the commute for others like Jefferson, Madison, and George Washington from Virginia. The move eliminated Revolutionary War debts (mostly taken on by northern states) so that the country could gain a strong financial footing at inception. Hamilton agreed to the deal because he felt it was fair and best for the country, even though he personally did not benefit.
So it should not surprise anyone that Hamilton introduced the first apportionment plan to pass through Congress. The plan was simplistic and statistically unbiased. Although it passed Congress, it was vetoed by President Washington because it did not guarantee a representative from every state. In its place, an apportionment plan was developed by Jefferson. This Jeffersonian plan was very similar to Hamilton’s plan; however, it introduced an adjustment in the mathematics to ensure each state was guaranteed at least one representative. Conveniently, the plan ultimately added a representative to Virginia’s delegation at the expense of Delaware. It turns out that Jefferson’s plan favored states with larger populations. This was the first in a number of iterations of political maneuvering in the mathematical battle for allocation.
How Does the Sausage Get Made?
Congress instituted the ‘Method of Equal Proportions’ as the allocation method in 1941 and it remains in use today. The method drives to a solution which minimizes the difference in the average population per district and the relative difference in the individual share in a representative within each state. If these words sound complex…wait for it…it’s because they are. (If you want to talk the techie math talk, shoot me a message and we can geek out.) Simplistically put, the mindset for this concept is that adding a representative to a state with only a few representatives provides more value than adding a representative to a state that already has many representatives.
Since there are 435 seats in the House and just over 300 million people in the country based on the 2010 census, there should be a representative in Congress for about every 700,000 people. We’ll call this our representation ratio. So it would stand to reason that a state that has a population of 7 Million people may have 10 representatives while a state with 14 Million people would have 20 Representatives. Generally speaking this is what happens. But it’s also true that for every state and after every census the population is not evenly divisible by the representation ratio. Since awarding a state a fractional portion of a representative is not an option, the actual number of representatives are determined by either rounding up or rounding down. Hamilton’s plan simply specified that the state with the next greatest ‘leftover’ after this division would be rounded up until all 435 seats were filled. This does not necessarily happen when using the Method of Equal Proportions.
Would it Even Make a Difference?
After the 1980 Census, the state of California was in line for an increase in its representation in the House. Its population had increased to about 10.5% of the U.S. Population to 23.67 million people. Since the representation ratio was about one for every 520,000 people, California would seem to be in line for 46 of the 435 representatives in the House. Its population was 45 units of 519,000 with an additional 300,000 left to be accounted. On the other hand, Montana had 787,000 people a count that would justify one representative with an additional 267,000 left to be accounted. Since California had more ‘leftover’ people to be accounted for, it would seem that California would get priority over Montana for an additional representative. Not only was this not the case, but if we didn’t adjust the representation from the other 48 states, California would actually need to have a population increase of 2 million people to reach a level that would enable the state to regain priority over Montana for the extra seat.
After the 1990 Census a similar oddity led to three states gaining round-up priority over three more-deserving states. In this case the more populous northeastern states of Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York were helpless onlookers as Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Washington jumped up in the queue. I did not review particular voting counts on bills that were approved or rejected by the House in the subsequent 10 years. However, I did notice that the three former states (Mass., NJ & NY) were states that Al Gore won in 2000. Meanwhile, two of the three latter states were states won by George W. Bush. Since electoral votes are directly tied to the number of Congress members in each state, the difference in allocation methods would have changed the outcome of the 2000 election to an electoral tie, leaving the ultimate outcome not to the hanging chads of Florida, but ironically to the House of Representatives, which is tasked with breaking electoral ties.
What Comes Next?
One of the great compromises of the new-found government of the United States was to have a two-house system, one that gives each state an equal vote (the Senate with two votes for each states) and a second that divides representation based on the populations of each state. With that foundation, the Senate already grossly over-represents the population of smaller states. The House of Representatives was designed to balance that equation and ensure that one-half of Congress truly represented the people. It undoubtedly makes sense to switch the allocation method for Representatives in the House, one last time, back to a plan similar to the one that Hamilton devised at the inception of this Country’s democracy. This could be done simply by stipulating that each state with a population below the representation ratio should round-up to one representative before any other states are considered for rounding up.