We Need More Seats in the House

The number 538 is so culturally relevant that Nate Silver, perhaps the best-known statistician of our era, named his website after it. Let’s examine 538, and its component parts. This is the number of votes in the Electoral College. It is the result of an equation: 435 + 100 + 3 = 538.The 435 number is equal to the number of seats in the House of Representatives. Per Article I of the Constitution, every state has at least one seat in the House. The number 100 is equal to the number of seats in the Senate. Per Article I, every state has two
senators. And the number 3 is equal to (per the 23rd Amendment) the number of electoral votes allocated to the District of Columbia, which shall be no greater than the least populous state. So far, so good.

There is a mathematically sensible equation that is grounded in republican and democratic principles. This is undisputedly true of 100 and 3. However, is this true of 435? It is not. In 1912, the House capped its membership at 435. Then, the most recent Census — which occurred in 1910 — counted our population at 92,228,496. There were 212,020 people per representative. Our most recent Census in 2010 counted our population at more than 308 million. There were 709,760 per representative. Yet we still have 435 representatives.

Let’s change this. There is no reason for Congress to be less representative than it was a century ago. It should be equally, if not more, representative. The 29th Amendment must determine a mathematical method, grounded in democratic principles, that determines the total number of House seats and apportions them among the states by population.