[EM] The History of Apportionment

[Forest Simmons]

On Wed, 13 Mar 2002, Narins, Josh wrote:

> method, but the cap. The 2000 apportionment would have been fairer (by
> measurement of the standard deviation of all districts) with only 432 Reps
> instead of 435. Oh well. Sorry, I might have been able to do something about
> it.

I once worked on this aspect (that fairer results could be obtained by
letting the total float) but when I found out that voting power is a much
bigger consideration that swamps the proportionality issue, I abandonded
that line of investigation.

Both Banzhaf power and Shapely-Shubik power are only in rough proportion
to the number of representatives.  It's voting power that should be
equalized as much as possible.  Basically, a random voter in my state
should have the same chance of electing someone who makes a pivotal vote
in the House of Representatives on a random issue as the vote of a random
voter in your state.  Perfectly proportional representation does not
usually optimize this objective.

Forest