Imagine that you have a nation that is one thousand square miles in size. Ninety percent of the nation is taken up by a city of ten million people. The other ten percent is empty desert and wilderness, populated only by a grizzled hermit named Jim. Tasked with inventing a representative political system for this country, you say, “Well, looks like there are two areas here, so I’ll draw a line between the city and Jim’s land, and I’ll give each an equal number of representatives. When the ten million city people want something they will have to negotiate with Jim, who has a power equal to all of them combined.”
Stupid, right? Yes. This is the United States Senate. This is quite literally the design of the U.S. Senate…
Ironically, though, Senate seats are more often in play than House seats, because their borders are set, and they can’t be gerrymandered to advantage one side or the other. Yes, the population of a state can lean one way or the other, but thatis much harder to game.
I would be in favor of keeping the Senate, but balancing out the seats a bit, and removing the requirement that 2 seats go to every state. Large states might get 3 or 4 Senators. Small states may have to share one. You may have some “redistricting” where which state is assigned to which seat changes, but there would no longer be such a discrepancy between Senators and how many people they represent.
US divided up into 50 approximately equal-population states:
Maybe keep the traditional state borders if you like, but divide up the Senate by those boundaries or something like them. Probably still vulnerable to a certain amount of gerrymandering, so that’s a concern, but almost certainly better than our current arrangement.
If this were the solution I would think you’d have to be constantly updating borders. Even if you ignored the inevitable conflicts which would arise of this, this solution itself would spur a certain amount of migration. (Thinking of the current trend of MAGATS moving to cultural “safe-spaces”, places like Florida and Texas.) This kind of radical border redrawing would accelerate these pre-existing trends IMO.
I always kinda liked the idea of having the most populous city of every State elect a senator, directly counterbalancing the rural overrepresentation.
Simply removing the permanent apportionment from 1911 that artificially limits the House would dramatically reduce the effect of the gerrymandering. The House should be nearly 3x as large as it is. The odds of the House being within one or two seats at any given point would basically be zero.
could you do something weird like take the state with the least population, and set that as a floor for every other state? alaska gets 1, california gets round(population/alaska population) ?
This is generally called the “Wyoming Rule”, because since 1990 it’s been the least populous state.
https://gigafact.org/fact-briefs/was-nevada-the-least-populous-state-until-1960/
I’m almost positive CGP Grey did something along these lines, with spreadsheets and everything, but I cannot for the life of me find the video.
There was a multipart series on voting.
Is it one of those?
Possibly, though it would’ve been one of the newer ones.