Structural changes you'd like to make to US national government

I would work the other way. I would figure out the optimal number of people to be represented by one represenator (100,000 maybe?) and then divide our population by that number to obtain the number of represenators. I would keep the old rule about each state having a minimum of 1 represenator, but is there a state with a current population of less than 100,000?

Please spay/neuter your pets. Also, defang your copperheads.

You mean for the Senate? Or for the House?

@ Oscar. Don't think so.

Well, considering each state has its own Legislature, I think having less than 200 thousand per member (in the Representatives) is representatively futile.

There are States with a population of less than a million, but none, to my knowledge, with less than 100,000. After all, 60,000 is the minimum to be a State in the first place, and we haven't added a State in decades.

@Ace,

The House.

"Shit, our candidate is a psychopath. Better replace him with Newt Gingrich."

The House, or a unicameral body if we went that route. I just use the term represenator because of the Rule of Funny.

Also I disagree with the arbitrary cap being a necessary evil. My counter argument is that 5,000 representatives would be sub-optimal, as that would be too many to properly conduct business. That said, throwing out some odd (or even) number without justification doesn't really make much sense.

EDIT:100,000 would seem to be too low in retrospect, as it would produce too many representatives to be structurally sound. 1,000,000 would be a bit low, as it would leave states with only representative (but that may be case now). Perhaps look at the state with the lowest population, give them one representative, and apportion representatives to the other states based upon multiples of that states population?

Well, anyway, "Real Life" is interrupting (sick parent), so I'll let y'all hash the details out.

edited 22nd Feb '12 2:04:19 PM by OscarWildecat

Please spay/neuter your pets. Also, defang your copperheads.

Well...

Are we going on the assumption that the Representatives is elected via STV and not simple-plurality?

It's a necessary evil unless you want to be constantly increasing the size of the Capitol building and paying the salaries of the Congresspeople and all their staffs. It would cost several unnecessary fortunes.

"Shit, our candidate is a psychopath. Better replace him with Newt Gingrich."

I think 2500 would just be too "loud". Local issues should in general be handled by more local governments so that the nation's legislature isn't swarmed.

Legislature sizes aren't usually that big. Compare the United States, which has 3rd largest population for a nation (313,059,000), and which currently has 435 members in the lower house.

• China's unicameral congress has 2987 members. China is the most populous nation with 1,347,350,000 people. So probably US House of Representatives shouldn't be larger than that.
• United Kingdom has House of Commons at 650, for 62,300,000 people (22nd place).
• Japan, 10th place (127,770,000), has 480 members in the lower house.
• South Korea (25th place with 48,580,000) has unicameral of 299.
• Russia, the largest country with substantial population (8th place at 143,030,106), has 450 for lower house.
• India, 2nd place (1,210,193,422), has 545 for lower house.
• Brazil, 5th place (192,376,496), has 513 for lower house.
• Indonesia, 4th place (237,641,326), has 560 for lower house.

edited 22nd Feb '12 2:03:48 PM by abstractematics

Now using Trivialis handle.

Actually, I was asking that question to hopeless for elaboration. *shrug* So yes... STV.

750 sounds like an optimum number, really. Not too big, not too small.

• Member magnitude: 400 thousand electors per member
• District magnitude: 3 members per district
• District electorate size: 1.2 mn per district
• District count: 250

1. Senators are no longer elected, but are selected from a list of qualified citizens through a random lottery system. Getting qualified would require a rigorous testing process conducted on the state, rather than the federal, level. Qualifications would include such things as a clean legal record, demonstration of understanding of the constitution, taking an oath to uphold the sanctity and import of government, having resided in the state for a number of years, yadda yadda yadda.

In addition, winning the lottery only qualifies you for nomination - an election would still occur on a state level, namely whether to accept the winner of the lottery or to run the lottery again.

2. During sessions, a live feed of voters' opinions on the bill would be broadcast in an area where senators and representatives can clearly see the opinion poll. It could be handled similarly to twitter. The feed would be cut after initial deliberations - no broadcasts would occur during the actual vote.

Question: Would the districts span state boundaries? If not, then the system you proposed could run into issues with regards to uneven population distribution.

FWIW, the 2011 US population is roughly 311,591,917. The population of the least populous state (Wyoming) is 568,158. That works out to a US population of roughly 548 Wyomings.

Please spay/neuter your pets. Also, defang your copperheads.

I like that method for some reason. Number of Representatives = nat'l pop/pop of smallest state (rounded up in all cases) OR number of states times 10, whichever is larger, and then allocated proportionally. It'd also allow the House to grow with the population (so long as Wyoming doesn't see a massive increase in population) without growing really frakking fast (part of why they locked the size of the House).

edited 22nd Feb '12 3:05:49 PM by Balmung

@ Oscar. Well, not necessarily. Federal systems that use a multi-member system (e.g. Germany) still have districts within state boundaries, but if need be, they can span state lines.

Okay. Then, instead of a "hard division" of representatives among electors, one would have a "soft division" that allows for certain leeway in dealing with the various state populations.

Please spay/neuter your pets. Also, defang your copperheads.

• Limit the length of bills

Generally, I like the intent of this but more to the point, I would like for congressmen to have to read all legislation fully before being allowed to vote. I'm not entirely sure how you might guarantee such a thing to happen though.

• Eliminate "poison pill" bill attachments

I would prefer that if you table legislation that is very large but there are controversial clauses that congress can vote down certain pieces that are unpopular without voting down the whole thing, in addition to voting down riders. You wouldn't need to care if something is "related" to it or not, it'd be voted on separately to see if it passes or not.

• Limit the filibuster

I would just say that if you filibuster, you have to actually filibuster. In many parliamentary systems, filibuster can only delay legislation for a number of days and that's it (because you run out of room to filibuster after that). If in that time you couldn't garner enough popular support to do something then too bad.

• Sensible non-gerrymandered districts

Normally, in other countries, districts are formed after a census is performed, population will have shifted and a non-partisan committee agrees on the new districts. The ruling party does not get power to create the districts. There's only two parties in America but I guess that means two-parties do it.

• Eliminate conflicts of interest

Yeah. No stocks, no businesses, no nothing. Only one job, your political one.

• Reform the use of money in politics

I think I would say ban corporate donations, ban third party ads during election time and limit private donations to $100 (because really, who has $1000 to give?).

• Create a review that tracks the flow of budget money

I'd like to computerise government. All transactions are done through the computer system and thus all transactions are tracked. This in turn is then put onto the internet. Then like expanding out folders in "windows explorer" you start at the top level, where money goes into the top categories of spending. You press expand, it expands out to more specific departments. Then more specific projects. Then specific uses in the projects. Then specific items/salaries related to a project.

• Make going to war harder

Well the original concept of Congress have to vote on it seems good enough. Let's just do it the way it's supposed to be done.

• Kill the PATRIOT ACT

And make sure SOPA/PIPA doesn't go ahead and anything else that resembles similar legislation.

• Size of Congress

While we could argue a lot about the perfect number of congressmen, do we at least agree that more are needed? I think that at the very least, given the size of the United States, there should be at least 800 congressmen. Three hundred million people is a lot, and having basically 30% more congressmen than Canada's parliament is very undemocratic as it leads to an oligarchy much too easily.

If need be, do we want like an under-congress which has a representative per 300 000 people and then a main congress of roughly 800 people (house and senate combined)? That could be another option. Americans don't care about slow legislation, they care about democracy, so I think it's a "sell-able" idea.

I'm guessing we're talking in terms of pure hypotheticals that we either know will never happen or know could easily turn out worse than what we have if they're actually implemented. That said...

There's a reform I've considered which I can't think of an example of in real life. Why not have it so that all representatives don't necessarily have an equal vote, but instead proportionate to the number of people they represent? I do think that we have to set an upper limit on the number of representatives somewhere (thought it could probably be higher than it is now) but that could be corrected for by having the value of their vote determined by their number of constituents. It could also correct for a lot of the problems that the "winner-take-all" system creates. So for instance, say a district's population entitles it to five votes in Congress. Each candidate who gets at least twenty per cent of the vote would get a seat in Congress, with the number of votes they get determined by what proportion of the population of that district voted for them. This could potentially break the two major parties' stranglehold on the federal government and alleviate (to some extent) the problem of people living in an area that is overwhelmingly a different ideology from them thinking their vote is worthless.

I have no idea what sort of impact this sort of system would have in real life or if there's any government that has something similar but it makes sense to me.

edited 22nd Feb '12 4:16:10 PM by joeyjojojuniorshabadoo

The main concern with giving a representative multiple votes is that you get large swings depending on what the representative thinks.

Now using Trivialis handle.

I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say. If anything, what I'm proposing would lessen the impact of a particular representative's whims by splitting districts among multiple representatives.

If it's proportional to the number of people they represent, then someone's vote is going to count for more. That kind of cements "winner take all". Also, that's a terrible way to make things proportional. When we talk about proportional, we usually mean either one representative represents a set amount of people, or a party gets a certain number of seats based on how many people voted for that party or members of that party.

Doing it your way isn't really proportional at all. It gives a lot more power to heavily populated areas.

OK I think I must be getting some very basic terminology wrong because I don't follow what you're saying at all.

If it's proportional to the number of people they represent, I would think that every individual's (if not every representative's) vote would be more or less equal, since, in theory, they each have an equal fraction of a vote in Congress. Right? At least closer to equal than what we have now.

Maybe I am misusing the term here, but I thought that "winner take all" referred to how whatever candidate gets the slightest majority, or even the plurality, gets total control of that position. I would think that splitting the district among multiple candidates would be the opposite of that.

Fair enough, I'm probably misusing "proportionality". And I should probably have clarified that my ideal system would have all districts have as close to the same population as possible, but since you can't get it perfect without having no upper limit on the number of representatives (which somebody already pointed out is impractical), the uneven votes would correct for these slight inequalities. Also, again, I thought the point behind those sort of systems was that in theory everyone in the country has roughly equal representation in the legislature, and what I'm proposing is an attempt to get even closer to that ideal.

Again, I must be misunderstanding what you mean by "proportional". I was thinking it meant "every X people has the same amount of influence in the legislature", which is ideally what I would think things should be like. If that were the case, then of course highly populated areas would have more influence. I thought all the ideas about restructuring Congress (and the Electoral College) was because rural areas have disproportionate influence.

I'm completely willing to admit that my idea has some glaring flaws (in fact I suspect that it does, since I've never seen anyone else propose it), but I'm really not getting your objections.

So... you're saying have population-based districts, but also even out the votes themselves? As in, instead of one vote per roughly 100,000 people or so, your vote is worth 105,275 as opposed to someone else's vote being worth 99,895 because that's the number of people you represent.

Seems overkill but ok.

Now using Trivialis handle.

Probably not that precise (I was thinking more on the order of each district's "vote units" being in the single digits) but yeah, that's the basic idea. My focus was less evening out districts and more making it convenient for votes to be split. Again, I'm sure there's some huge flaw that I'm somehow not seeing here.

It violates our supposed precept of "one man, one vote." Which, when applied to the membership of the house, should mean that each rep stands for the same number of people as the other reps do.

edited 22nd Feb '12 6:17:36 PM by AceofSpades

But that's impossible. So we have one vote per approximately same number of people embodied into a representative.

I think the proposed suggestion, in more extreme terms, is instead of having 1:1 representing 100,245:99,985, we have 1.1026:1 instead (that's 100,245 / 99,985 to four decimal places).

Now using Trivialis handle.