How many people per Congressional District is the ideal quantity?

[progressive85]

It should be no more than half a million

[MarkD]

If the concern is to make the small population of WY fairly represented, one way to determine the number is to return to the original Jefferson method of apportionment used in the early US. In that method you divide each state's population by a series of integers from 1 to the maximum number of seats and place them in a table with one state per row and one divisor in each column. Then to apportion N seats, look at the N largest numbers in the table and assign that number of seats to each state based on how many in each row are on the list of largest numbers.

In this case I'll let the number of seats vary until WY gets one seat, then stop and see how many seats are assigned. The equivalent process is to divide each state's population by a number d such that the quotient is larger than the WY population, but would be smaller if you divided by d+1. For instance in 2010 WY has a population of 586.3 K and AL has a population of 4,803.0 K. If I divide the population of AL by 8 it is 600.4 K and by 9 is 533.7 K, so AL would get 8 seats here. I can repeat that for each state and add them up to get the size of Congress such that WY is the threshold to get a seat.

In 2010 the House would have 523 seats.
In 2020 my projections are that the House would have 540 seats.

The seats could be left apportioned according to the Jefferson model (great for large states) or they could be reapportioned from that number based on the current Huntington-Hill method (best for smaller states).

I like the second method the best, especially since I can't make head nor tail out of the first one. 540 seats is not too many (notwithstanding the fact that Capitol Hill will need a little bit bigger House chamber, and there will need to be more office space near the Cannon, Longworth, and Rayburn buildings).

Actually the Jefferson method is one of the most mathematically simple, so I apologize for such a cursory description. By its more common name, D'Hondt, it's used by dozens of countries to award seats in multiparty proportional elections.

BTW in a visit I made to the US House in 2001, the capitol architect said that the chamber could accommodate about 600 without significant remodeling. Note that the House and Senate fit comfortably together there for the SOTU.

You see, about 540 seats in the House, 100 Senators, 9 Supreme Court Justices, and there's not enough room to hold a SOTU address in the House chamber. We will have to have a bigger chamber.

Anyway, to answer the OP, I would say that using the formula Muon described in his second paragraph, in which the state with the smallest population is the one that sets the threshold to get a seat, and given that Wyoming's population in the next census is apt to be about 585K, then that's the ideal population for a district. The ideal population will still go up, though, once every ten years, unless something drastic happens, say, to the state of Vermont, in which it becomes the threshold instead of Wyoming, and Vermont's population starts declining (which is a distinct possibility - it appears to already be happening).

[muon2]

You see, about 540 seats in the House, 100 Senators, 9 Supreme Court Justices, and there's not enough room to hold a SOTU address in the House chamber. We will have to have a bigger chamber.

But there's no requirement that the SOTU be in the House or that it be given as a speech before Congress. That's just tradition. As far as seating when the IL Gov gives a SotS speech before a joint session extra folding chairs are brought in for the Senators and they sit where they want amongst the House members. There aren't enough places for the combined body as currently laid out. When the IL House chamber was last remodeled in 2006 there was thought about joint sessions, but since those are rare the decision was to fill the space based only on the number of House members.

[jimrtex]

If the concern is to make the small population of WY fairly represented, one way to determine the number is to return to the original Jefferson method of apportionment used in the early US. In that method you divide each state's population by a series of integers from 1 to the maximum number of seats and place them in a table with one state per row and one divisor in each column. Then to apportion N seats, look at the N largest numbers in the table and assign that number of seats to each state based on how many in each row are on the list of largest numbers.

In this case I'll let the number of seats vary until WY gets one seat, then stop and see how many seats are assigned. The equivalent process is to divide each state's population by a number d such that the quotient is larger than the WY population, but would be smaller if you divided by d+1. For instance in 2010 WY has a population of 586.3 K and AL has a population of 4,803.0 K. If I divide the population of AL by 8 it is 600.4 K and by 9 is 533.7 K, so AL would get 8 seats here. I can repeat that for each state and add them up to get the size of Congress such that WY is the threshold to get a seat.

In 2010 the House would have 523 seats.
In 2020 my projections are that the House would have 540 seats.

The seats could be left apportioned according to the Jefferson model (great for large states) or they could be reapportioned from that number based on the current Huntington-Hill method (best for smaller states).

As you may know, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson talked George Washington into vetoing the first apportionment bill. This was the first ever veto of a bill passed by Congress. Congress could not override the veto, not because they thought Jefferson&Washington were right, but because they revered Washington.

Congress then deliberately picked a divisor that would do the least harm compared to a more reasonable apportionment.

The way t do this is to do an apportionment by Ste. Lague and D'Hondt and choose the number of seats where the apportionment varies the least.

[jimrtex]

If the concern is to make the small population of WY fairly represented, one way to determine the number is to return to the original Jefferson method of apportionment used in the early US.

Delaware really got screwed by Jefferson's method.

It wasn't really about fairness at all. It was either Jefferson favoring his own state of Virginia, or his ego convincing him that his interpretation of the Constitution was right and browbeating Washington into accepting Jefferson's superior intellectual ability.

[muon2]

If the concern is to make the small population of WY fairly represented, one way to determine the number is to return to the original Jefferson method of apportionment used in the early US.

Delaware really got screwed by Jefferson's method.

It wasn't really about fairness at all. It was either Jefferson favoring his own state of Virginia, or his ego convincing him that his interpretation of the Constitution was right and browbeating Washington into accepting Jefferson's superior intellectual ability.

No doubt Jefferson's method favors the big states. That's why I was using it only to set the number of seats, then one could apportion them by Huntington Hill. The effect is to have a number of seats such that WY is not overly small compared to the average district. In 2010 the total of 523 seats would give an average of 591 K per seat compared to 568 for WY. That's a better fit than an average seat size of 710 K with 435 seats.

[Tartarus Sauce]

Definitely 500,000, that’s what I usually use when making Congressional districts.