2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: What lessons do YOU take from the results? [View all]politicat
(9,808 posts)One Wyoming or North Dakota vote is worth 3 to 4 times in the EC what a California, New York or even Colorado vote is worth. It takes 3-4 urban voters, 80% of the population, to counter-balance each vote from the 20% of the rural population. And that's not okay.
But it's an artificial limitation, not constitutionally mandated. It derives from the Apportionment acts of 1911, 41 and 59, which fixed the size of the House (394 in 1911, raised by the other two acts to 433 and 435). At the time of the 1911 act, this meant every Member of the House represented around or up to 200,000 people. This was primarily a practicality matter: the Capitol Building is tight on space, and continues to be tight.
If we returned to the benchmark of 200K persons per Member, we'd have around 2000 Members, and a deliberative body that large would be unwieldy. Setting a new standard -- 1 Member per 500K of population, would increase the size of the House, without removing the minimum representation of the small population states. Building or acquiring more space is relatively trivial --it's an infrastructure project! -- and we have far superior technological means to allow for the management of the body.
It's primarily a thought experiment at the moment -- this is power, and without control of the House and Senate, it's not power that will be redistributed -- but it's not impossible, and it comes without the existential risks of convening a ConCon (and to change the EC, we're looking at either significant, multiple amendments, or ConCon.)
This country was less than 50% urban until between 1940 and 1950. Today, we're 80% urban. The EC made sense when we were primarily an agricultural society with limited communication, but that's changed and it won't change back.