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Published online 8 January 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.419
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Mathematician proposes another way of divvying up the US House
As the US campaign revs up, mathematicians debate how states should be represented.
With 53 seats in the US House of Representatives, California has long dominated congressional and electoral politics. Now mathematician Paul Edelman says that a much-needed rehaul of the way these seats are assigned would knock them down three notches.
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While I agree that studies like this one, are interesting mathematically, I have doubts about this one's practicality. It's nigh hopeless to persuade pols by such a study, and probably not worth the effort to try. Moreover, imbalances such as described are readily corrected over time by the census process, and even faster politically by the 2-year election cycle. The small discrepancy from exact balance is offset by the volatility in party representation in the House. Seldom is a 1 to 2 vote variance from perfect tuning of the House going to be decisive in control of the body. On the other hand, the more critical counterweight to one-man, one-vote representation in the American system is the two-votes per state composition of the Senate, particularly in conjunction with its cloture rule.