• Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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    2 hours ago

    No, this would almost certainly be a symptom of the Republic functioning more or less correctly. I’ll get to what that means in a moment.

    Each state gets exactly two senators and at least one congressman. If the state has a large population, it gets more congressmen, which is why, say, Virginia has more congressmen than Wyoming does despite Wyoming being physically larger. Nobody lives in Wyoming.

    Well, what if a large number of people move out of Virginia and move into Wyoming? Why should the state of Virginia keep representatives for people it no longer has? This is a major reason we do a census every ten years.

    There is some rot to be removed here: The number of representatives was capped, so instead of "count your population, divide by 100,000 and send that many representatives) or whatever, there’s this weird algorithm where “everyone gets one, and then we rank the states by how many people are represented per congressman. The one with the biggest people to congressman ratio is issued another congressman, until they’ve all been distributed.” Which still makes it kinda goofy.