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We need to add 6,000 seats to Congress. I'm serious. | Opinion
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this post was submitted on 26 May 2026
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I read the article, but don't follow the argument. Add some seats, and then each representative will represent fewer voters. So what? How does that fix gerrymandering or make elections more representative?
The easiest solution is of course proportional representation. Can't gerrymander if there are no districts.
But if you must have districts for some reason, then... just don't put politicians in charge of drawing them.
To try and understand how/why adding additional seats to Congress would be a positive change (or really, ANY proposal) - take the most extreme ends of the spectrum:
With 1 single seat, 50.1% of voters would get 100% of the representation.
With 1 seat for every voter, 50.1% of voters would get 50.1% of the representation.
Obviously, not EVERY single person can be a congressman - so the goal should be to find the minimum number of representatives required to optimally represent the populace.
Always nice to look at edge cases, but the 1 seat per voter is never going to happen, not least because that'd be direct democracy, not representative democracy.
For any realistically-sized consituency, as long as the election remains first-past-the-post, if the votes are evenly split among districts, 50.1% of the voters would still get 100% of the representation.
In addition, gerrymandering will still be possible.
As for proportional representation (upthread), it can also lead to antidemocratic anomalies, as can every electoral system. That's because they all have to meet requirements that are sometimes logically contradictory. In existing systems that approximate PR, coalition governments are common, and centrist parties have disproportionate power since they're the difference between a coalition with a majority and one without. So the centrists end up perpetually in government and often prevent the larger parties from meeting their manifesto commitments.
It would make it harder to bribe congress.
All Congressman don’t represent the same number of people because they won’t expand the number.
We'll it would be harder to pick some Democrats from this neighborhood and a bunch of Republicans from that neighborhood if the district size is only one neighborhood
Also it would allow for more specific representation. Using myself as an example, my district is basically my county plus a couple small parts of some neighboring counties. One end of the county is pretty rural, the other half butts up against a major city and pretty much just bleeds right into it. We have some ridiculously wealthy old money areas, and we have some that look like they were plucked from a movie about gang violence. There's a few towns here that I've legitimately never even had to drive through. It's kind of insane that all of these different areas are being represented by the same person, we have very different and sometimes conflicting concerns. And if I needed to go to my representatives office for any reason, I'd have to drive about an hour to get there because of course she's set up shop at the far end of the county from me.
Personally, I think the ideal way to draw districts is to kind of have voters do it when they vote. Give them a map, have them select the areas where they live, work, shop, drive through regularly, or have other connections to until they've selected an area with a big enough population to be a district. Then feed those maps into a computer and have it average them all together to generate the new district map.
They'll just take half of one neighborhood and half of the other.