United States congressional apportionment

Article One, Section 2, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution initially provided: Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

Under Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution, the number of electors of any state equals the size of its total congressional delegation (House and Senate seats).

Federal law requires the Clerk of the House of Representatives to notify each state government no later than January 25 of the year immediately following the census of the number of seats to which it is entitled.

[7] Because the deadline for the House Clerk to report the results does not occur until the following January, and the states need sufficient time to perform the redistricting, the decennial census does not affect the elections that are held during that same year.

[citation needed] The size of the U.S. House of Representatives refers to the total number of congressional districts (or seats) into which the land area of the United States proper has been divided.

Since 1789, when the United States Congress first convened under the Constitution, the number of citizens per congressional district has risen from an average of 33,000 in 1790 to over 700,000 as of 2018[update].

YElections are held the preceding year The ideal number of members has been a contentious issue since the country's founding.

George Washington agreed that the original representation proposed during the Constitutional Convention (one representative for every 40,000) was inadequate and supported an alteration to reduce that number to 30,000.

[10] Five years later, Washington was so insistent on having no more than 30,000 constituents per representative that he exercised the first presidential veto in history on a bill which allowed half states to go over the quota.

55, James Madison argued that the size of the House of Representatives has to balance the ability of the body to legislate with the need for legislators to have a relationship close enough to the people to understand their local circumstances, that such representatives' social class be low enough to sympathize with the feelings of the mass of the people, and that their power be diluted enough to limit their abuse of the public trust and interests.

... first, that so small a number of representatives will be an unsafe depositary of the public interests; secondly, that they will not possess a proper knowledge of the local circumstances of their numerous constituents; thirdly, that they will be taken from that class of citizens which will sympathize least with the feelings of the mass of the people, and be most likely to aim at a permanent elevation of the few on the depression of the many; ...[11][12]Madison also addressed Anti-Federalist claims that the representation would be inadequate, arguing that the major inadequacies are of minimal inconvenience since these will be cured rather quickly by virtue of decennial reapportionment.

On a contrary supposition, I should admit the objection to have very great weight indeed.Madison argued against the assumption that more is better: Sixty or seventy men may be more properly trusted with a given degree of power than six or seven.

[14] The United States has unusually large constituencies compared to other OECD countries,[14] the third largest in the world.

This failure to reapportion may have been politically motivated, as the newly elected Republican majority may have feared the effect such a reapportionment would have on their future electoral prospects.

This cap has remained unchanged since then, except for a temporary increase to 437 members (twice, in 1959 and 1961) upon the 1959 admission of Alaska and Hawaii into the Union.

Among the Bill of Rights amendments to the United States Constitution proposed by Congress in 1789, was one addressing the number of seats in the House.

[19]Taken at face-value, with the nation's population reaching approximately 308.7 million according to the 2010 census, the proposed amendment would have called for an up-to 6,000-member House.

[20][21][22] However, in the context of its original construction, the amendment may have instead outlined an iterative procedure for apportionment following a square root rule relative to the population (e.g.

After the first census in 1790, Congress passed the Apportionment Act of 1792 and adopted the Jefferson method to apportion U.S. representatives to the states based on population.

[33] The Jefferson method required fractional remainders to be discarded when calculating each state's total number of U.S. representatives and was used until the 1830 census.

However, Congress continued to pass ad hoc apportionment bills from 1850 through 1900, in each case overruling the procedure laid out in the 1850 census.

Apart from 1860, Congress deliberately chose after each census to set the size of the House at a level where Hamilton and Webster's methods gave the same apportionment.

[39] This unofficial adoption of Webster's method was driven by the discovery of the Alabama paradox, which created an uproar in the House.

[50] Apportionment results were released on April 26, 2021: The size of the U.S. House of Representatives has increased and decreased as follows:[51]