Wouldn't adding incremental representatives to the house "dilute" representation regardless? I would argue that this isn't a dilution of anyone's representation, it's a re-weighting of representatives to a more representative distribution based on underlying demographic movement over the last 10 years.
The number of representatives makes it hard to fairly apportion the seats. Montana went from 1 representative for 1M people to 2 for 1M, meaning each should represent about 500k people. Meanwhile in my district in NJ over 700k people are represented by one person. It was unfair before, when Montanans had too few representatives, and it is just as unfair now, when they have too many (compared to NJ). More representatives would improve the granularity and make the system (somewhat) fairer.
If improving granularity is the goal, wouldn’t it make even more sense to have fractional votes? After all, there’s no real reason why each representative’s vote should count equally...
It's sort of nice to be able to reason about votes in a straightforward way, and you'd have even worse social dynamics if some members are literally more powerful inside the chamber than others.
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Wouldn't adding incremental representatives to the house "dilute" representation regardless? I would argue that this isn't a dilution of anyone's representation, it's a re-weighting of representatives to a more representative distribution based on underlying demographic movement over the last 10 years.
The number of representatives makes it hard to fairly apportion the seats. Montana went from 1 representative for 1M people to 2 for 1M, meaning each should represent about 500k people. Meanwhile in my district in NJ over 700k people are represented by one person. It was unfair before, when Montanans had too few representatives, and it is just as unfair now, when they have too many (compared to NJ). More representatives would improve the granularity and make the system (somewhat) fairer.
If improving granularity is the goal, wouldn’t it make even more sense to have fractional votes? After all, there’s no real reason why each representative’s vote should count equally...
It's sort of nice to be able to reason about votes in a straightforward way, and you'd have even worse social dynamics if some members are literally more powerful inside the chamber than others.