Talk Elections

Setting the number of House seats at 435 in 1941 stopped Al Gore from officially winning the 2000 Presidential election..

http://www.thirty-thousand.org/pages/Neubauer-Zeitlin.htm

Clearly FDR is a Bush enabler and a terrorist.

Interesting. I've always been a supporter of a larger House, but not for this reason. More seats means that each Representative becomes more responsible to his or her individual community and makes it easier to launch localized campaigns on low budgets.

Seriously though, it makes perfect sense that this would be the case.  Every state will have two more electoral votes than it "should" were it the case that electoral votes are distributed purely by population.  That inherently biases the system in favor of the candidate who is able to appeal to a larger number of the fifty states.  As the number of electoral votes increases, the weight of these two extra electoral votes is diminished, and the fact of who won the most states becomes less and less of an issue, eclipsed by the fact of who won the most populous states.

And yet, we can't invent a time machine and Gore is not the President... so what is it worth pointing this out?

Make the house be set at 1,000.

As Gabu pointed out, this is just a thread calling out FDR for being a Bush supporter.

Well... Pearl Harbor was planned by FDR... 9/11 by Bush... it only makes sense.  Hey, I wonder if would could search for some Lincoln/Kennedy like correlations between FDR and Bush

...Or just keep increasing the size at each Census like was supposed to happen. Setting the House at 1,000 would cause the same problems of a lack of individual representation half a century from now.

I can't imagine how such an enormous body could function.  Would it really be plausible to have a House so large?  I'm definitely an advocate for increasing the House to 499 or 501 (to prevent a tie) but 1,000 just seems like way to many people to be effective. 

Britain's House of Commons has 646 members (it was 653 until the 2005 reorganization in Scotland that made Scottish constituencies equal to English ones and will be 654 after the next election), and the House of Lords is even larger. They never have a problem functioning.

It would be nice to return to the days of 300,000 people/Representative.  If that were still the case today, every single state would likely have at least two representatives and 4 electoral votes.

Let's be honest.  Very few members of the Lords attend.  The quorum is 3.  The Commons Chamber, IIRC, cannot hold all the members, IIRC.

In principle, I agree with a fixed population representative system.  I note however that the PA State House has 203 members, and that has not improved representation.

Another option is to fix the ideal district population equal to the population of the smallest state. In 2000 this would be WY at 495K. It would have resulted in 569 seats in the house.

I'd prefer it to be fixed to an actual number.  Perhaps somewhere between 300,000-600,000 people per district.  If you attach it to the population of the smallest state there is the chance (albeit slim) that the ideal district size could balloon up over 1 million or shrink down to only 100,000.

That's more down to the size of the Chamber itself (it's tiny!) than the number of M.P's.

Your numbers are wrong. :P

(Was 659, will be 650. Is 646 is correct.)

I guess I should stop trying to do the addition in my head. I used to be good at math...

Although Wikipedia says that 17 constituencies are being abolished, and 25 are being created from scratch, so 654 should be correct.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_change_recommendations_for_the_next_UK_general_election

That list includes lots of constituencies that are simply majorly redrawn rather than new (the abolished list is also too long, but not by as much).

Historically the population of the smallest state changes slowly with time. Unless a new small state entered the union, or small states somehow merged, I see little chance of the extremes you note.