[EM] Making a Bad Thing Worse

[Stephen Turner]

(snip)
> However, it's hard to change the Constitution. Maybe it would be more 
> feasible to make reforms that aren't perceived as shifting the balance 
> of power between states. For example,
> 
>     * Define the Electoral College apportionment as the Huntington-Hill
>       apportionment of 435 votes between the states, plus two additional
>       votes for each state, plus 3 votes for D.C. (The House could
>       change size later without affecting the presidential election.)
(snip)

There is another issue with the suggestion of using Huntington-Hill
to populate the Electoral College  that perhaps also is worth addressing.
(The author may well have known this but has not said so.)

The Huntington-Hill method (a.k.a. Equal Proportions) is the method
currently used to determine states' apportionments for the U.S. 
House of Representatives.  It is known that the method has a 
built-in bias in favour of small states, just as Greatest Divisors 
(a.k.a. Jefferson) has a bias for large states, whereas the only
divisor method that avoids this is Major Fractions (Webster).

This has been known since work by by Balinski and Young in the 1970s,
and you can read a short article by Young summarising this at:
www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200104/backpage.cfm

Attempting to change the apportiornment method as well, 
rather goes against the strategy described of not
attempting reforms that are perceived as affecting the 
balance of power, but it may still be something to
think about.  

In terms of population then, both houses
of the U.S. Congress give extra influence to small states
like Wyoming, whereas the  Senate was created as
it is precisely as a countervailing force to the large 
states, in the so-called Great Compromise.  Arguably 
the House of Reps should not have the same characteristic.

(Off-topic: are other people finding the threading of 
electorama messages confusing?  For some time
it has separated subject from message body and
sent double copies of the latter.  But no-one 
has mentioned this AFAICT.)