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…
Wait until you find out between the discrepancy between House districts across states. Theres a special formula used to calculate the number of districts each state gets but it’s kinda BS and still ends up with unfair distribution.
It’s all because it was capped in the early 20th century instead of just being properly rebalanced.
WI has 1 house rep for every 575k people and CA gets 1 for every 750k people. If it was distributed evening based on the state with the lowest population, CA would get something like an extra 15 votes.
*Note - My numbers could be off a bit. I actually did the math myself several months ago. I didn’t look it up to write this, I just am remembering off the top of my head
lemme tell you about the prposed Wyoming rule
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyoming_Rule