The Constitution sets a lower limit of 30,000 people per representative.
From Article I, section 2, paragraph 3:
The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative;
Congress could pass a simple law to maximize the number of Representatives given to each state consistent with the Constitutional limit.
Laws to adjust the number of Representatives have been passed several times in the past, most recently in 1929, amending a law passed in 1911. It merely requires a simple act of Congress. Call that law the Expanding Democracy Act. (Placeholder if you want to suggest a better name.)
This would have a huge number of advantages for our democracy, as described below the fold.
The small-state EC advantage would be eliminated.
CA has 69 times the population of WY, so ideally would have 69 times as many reps and 69 times as many EC votes. Under the current system CA only has 55 times as many reps and a miserable 19 times as many EC votes. With one rep per 30,000, WY would have 19 reps and CA would have 1316 reps, so CA would have 69 times as many reps (perfect) and 63 times as many EC votes (close enough for government work).
Having more representatives empowers marginalized communities.
With 10,000 representatives, chronically unrepresented groups dispersed across the nation (say Armenians, or Peruvians, or sheep farmers or artists or whatever) could cobble together a rep here and a rep there to get heard where it matters.
One rep from Atlanta, plus 1 from Detroit, plus 1 from LA, plus 1 from Houston, etc. , all linked by some common interest, could band together to get an actual vote on bills, in a way that would be impossible if their individual constituencies were buried in large districts and dispersed across state lines.
Elections would be more intimate and democratic.
It also makes elections vastly more intimate — candidates with a few thousand dollars would go door-to-door to reach a few precincts instead of spending millions of dollars and TV ads to reach 600,000 people. Everyone would know their Representative on a nearly first-name basis, so dirty tricks with smear campaigns or similar sounding names would be less likely to be effective.
If you’re choosing between someone you know from school board meetings and another whose kids went to school with yours, you’ll have an intimate (and accurate) view of them. TV ads won’t change that. Robocalls won’t change that. Twitter or Facebook campaigns won’t change that. These are people you could have a cup of coffee with if you cared to get that involved.
Special elections become quick and simple.
It would make our government more resilient to attack.
Nuke DC and there are still 9,000+ reps able to instantly vote on matters.
Special elections would rarely, if ever, have the potential to significantly affect the ongoing work of Congress. Replacing 1 or 5 members out of 10,000 is inherently less disruptive than doing the same when the balance is 220/215.
There would be more oversight of the executive branch.
With 10,000 members it becomes possible to have hundreds of committees that can specialize in oversight over EPA, the Fed, National Parks, Transportation, the CDC, the Post Office, airports, each of the armed forces, and on and on. More eyes makes it harder for anyone in the executive branch to pull a fast one.
Gerrymandering could be eliminated.
The only issue I’m working out is how to effectively rule out gerrymandering. According to Prof. Wang (PEC) it is easier to gerrymander small districts. I don’t buy that (in the extreme, if every person was their own rep, gerrymandering would be impossible), but I haven’t done the math with actual geographic data.
One option is to require maps to minimize the total periphery length of districts. That would provide a precise mathematical definition of the only allowed borders and gerrymandering would be (by definition) impossible, but the effect could be as bad as current gerrymandering, I just don’t have the data to evaluate that.
10,000 is not an unwieldy number of representatives, at all.
We obviously can’t have 10,000 representatives (325,000 / 30,000) in the chambers of the House, but that can be dealt with a simple House rule, and not even the Senate needs to agree — just use remote or proxy voting, with some members (say those with 22+ proxies) given floor privileges.
That could be strengthened to require any member actually voting on bills to have at least 22 proxies (and perhaps no more than 40).
PLEASE: If anyone is skilled with electoral map data, contact me (reply or msg) — we could do something useful with that.
TODO LIST: How would past elections (say from 1948 on) have played out?