I’d prefer at least to maintain districts, 1 vote for 1 district, remove states and the extra two votes. Each district exactly the same number of people, give or take 1%. Give the low populated counties out in the boonies a chance to be heard.
But failing that, straight popular vote is a better option than the current cluster fuck.
If it is equal representation, why does having districts make the rural vote heard? Whether it is one person one vote or 100,000 people one vote it won’t make a difference.
Everyone will still have their representatives and senators to hear them. In fact I think we need to increase the number of representatives. It needs to be a number that a person can reasonably represent. Say 50 or 100 thousand people per representative. This would also help with gerrymandering as having a lot of small districts would make everyone’s voice louder.
But for national positions like the president, we should have proportional votes, preferably with getting rid of first past the post that got us stuck with the two party system to start with.
This would be a problem if it were 1924, but we’re living in 2024. The solutions for this are right in front of us and have been for decades. Get all these guys and gals on a secure teleconference and turn the Capitol building into a museum, or renovate it to have smaller private offices.
There, now we can get 10,000 reps in if we need to. The bigger concern is how are they going to decide who gets to speak with that many representatives. They can’t realistically give everybody equal floor time and expect government to be anything other than completely paralyzed. So the number probably still needs to be capped, but it should be capped at a value where whatever the state that has the lowest population sets the value at 1 and every other state divides their population by that number to figure out how many representatives they get.
There was an article (Archive Link) in The Washington Post discussing the nuts and bolts of how expanded representation could work. It wouldn’t be hard.
A quote from the article: To my surprise and delight, the team’s last proposal reveals that we could actually take the House of Representatives up to 1,725 members without having to construct a new building.
Absolutely, but let’s not make it worse by putting the presidential election behind it… It’s bad enough it causes an imbalance in the House of Representatives. It would be far worse than the Electoral College.
As a Washingtonian I also dream of that. It is ridiculous that only people in states that are kinda purple have their opinions heard.
I’d prefer at least to maintain districts, 1 vote for 1 district, remove states and the extra two votes. Each district exactly the same number of people, give or take 1%. Give the low populated counties out in the boonies a chance to be heard.
But failing that, straight popular vote is a better option than the current cluster fuck.
If it is equal representation, why does having districts make the rural vote heard? Whether it is one person one vote or 100,000 people one vote it won’t make a difference.
Everyone will still have their representatives and senators to hear them. In fact I think we need to increase the number of representatives. It needs to be a number that a person can reasonably represent. Say 50 or 100 thousand people per representative. This would also help with gerrymandering as having a lot of small districts would make everyone’s voice louder.
But for national positions like the president, we should have proportional votes, preferably with getting rid of first past the post that got us stuck with the two party system to start with.
Congress of going to need to expand a little bit, if all 3,330-6,660 reps should be able to gather at the same time.
This would be a problem if it were 1924, but we’re living in 2024. The solutions for this are right in front of us and have been for decades. Get all these guys and gals on a secure teleconference and turn the Capitol building into a museum, or renovate it to have smaller private offices.
There, now we can get 10,000 reps in if we need to. The bigger concern is how are they going to decide who gets to speak with that many representatives. They can’t realistically give everybody equal floor time and expect government to be anything other than completely paralyzed. So the number probably still needs to be capped, but it should be capped at a value where whatever the state that has the lowest population sets the value at 1 and every other state divides their population by that number to figure out how many representatives they get.
There was an article (Archive Link) in The Washington Post discussing the nuts and bolts of how expanded representation could work. It wouldn’t be hard.
A quote from the article: To my surprise and delight, the team’s last proposal reveals that we could actually take the House of Representatives up to 1,725 members without having to construct a new building.
Districts open things up to gerrymandering…
Which is a problem that needs to be solved regardless.
Absolutely, but let’s not make it worse by putting the presidential election behind it… It’s bad enough it causes an imbalance in the House of Representatives. It would be far worse than the Electoral College.