Reform Elections

The House of Representatives is the starting point for all spending by the U.S. Government. Candidates for the House of Representatives pay out of pocket for advertising and campaigning. So when running for office they are inclined to take contributions from a third party. These kinds of actions pave the way for national corruption.

How did the founders of the constitution view this problem?

by Bill Bolton

wrbp@flash.net

May 12

The United States Constitution (USC), while not explicitly stating this, implies that there should be a representative for every 30,000 Americans.  So for over a century the House simply added more representatives as the math dictated.  By the 1920s, however, they started to run into two problems.  One, states were trying to get as many representatives as could possibly be justified by the numbers so that they would have more votes in the House.  And two, the House itself physically ran out of room when they hit 433 members.  To solve these problems they passed  a law that capped the number of representatives at 433, a number that, at the time, upheld the 1 for 30,000 ratio.

Now, America has 300 million people and it is clear that the law of the 1920s in no way compensated for the fact that people would be so vastly underrepresented and estranged from their representatives.  The whole point of creating the House of Representatives was to give the people a local government official that could live near them, listen to their concerns, and carry those concerns back to Washington.  The current ratio of representatives to citizens, almost 700,000 for 1, completely undermines the intended sence of intimacy and local representation the USC intended.

The United States Constitution (USC) explicitly indicates that the People should have more US House Representatives. 

Currently, each US House member represents about 700,000 voters.  For a representative running for office, he or she may only spend 100 days in campaign, which means each day 7,000 voters would have to be solicited. The point here is that door-to-door solicitation will not work. 

Consequently, mass advertising is required such as advertisements in papers and on television.  However, mass advertising requires money, hence, a campaigner must sell his or her vote to the highest bidder, and the highest bidders are never the common voters.  This disenfranchises the common voters. 

What is going wrong is that we are not abiding by our USC in that a house member should never represent 700,000 voters. 

The smaller the groups of represented citizens, the more groups to cover the US, and hence the

more House Representatives.  For today's 300,000,000 population, if each group was as small as possible, meaning 30,000, then there would be 10,000 House members. 

The logistic of running the government with 10,000 House members is another story. 

Let us make a scenario where we assume high schools have on average 1,000 students and where each student signifies 10 voters living in the area.  The 10 would at least include a possible 5 for a student's two parents, two grandparents and one great-grandparent.  By multiplying 1,000 students by 10 voters, each high school would signify 10,000 voters.  Which means 3 high school areas would have to be joined together for a house member to exceed the USC 30,000 minimum. 

To summarize, the common voters are being disenfranchised because the US is not

following its Constitution on having house members represent less people.