In 1911, following the thirteenth decennial census, the House undertook its constitutionally mandated task of reapportionment, determining how many members there would be representing the Country’s more than 92 million people. The number was set at 433, with the provision to add two more seats when Arizona and New Mexico joined the Union.

But after the 1920 Census, Congress failed to act. For nearly a decade, they did nothing. Congress had failed to reapportion their number. Then, in 1929, in an act of cowardice and laziness, Congress passed a law that permanently fixed the size of the House of Representatives at 435. 

At that time the population of the Country was just over 106 Million.
At that time, the average congressional district contained around 210,000 people. 
Today? That number has exploded to over 760,000; in some cases we even see districts over one million. 

Representation Has Lost Its Way
One person cannot reliably and fairly represent three-quarters of a million citizens. With so few representatives and so many people, it’s no wonder that:

• Special interests wield outsized influence
• Gerrymandering runs rampant from Illinois to Texas, North Carolina to Maryland, even here in New Hampshire
• Congress feels distant, disconnected, and bitterly partisan

And we don’t need to look far to find better models:

• Germany has over 700 representatives in its lower House, yet a population of 83 million people
• The United Kingdom’s House of Commons has over 600 members for 67 million
• Italy’s House of Deputies has the same, for 61 million
• And here in New Hampshire? We have 400 state representatives for just 1.4 million people

By global standards, the U.S. House ranks 27th in legislative size per capita
We are not leading the free world. We are lagging.

The Founders’ Vision

This was never what the Founding Fathers intended.

The original First Amendment, the one that didn’t quite make it, proposed a proportional House that, by today’s numbers, would give us 6,600 representatives.

James Madison himself, writing in Federalist 55, argued that adequate representation was crucial to the integrity of the House, not just for lawmaking, but for faith in the republic.

Today, we have the tools to act. Popular reforms include

• The Wyoming Rule, which uses the smallest state’s population as a baseline, would leave us with ~550 members
• The Wyoming-2 Rule, similar as above, would bring the number of representatives to over 1000. 
• The Cube Root Rule, which simply takes the cube root of the U.S. population, would give us 698 representatives
• Ratifying the original First Amendment, which is still pending in several states.

Statistical models show that the ideal number to minimize representation disparity is about 930 representatives. 

Anticipating the Objections

I know what you’re thinking

“Won’t more representatives mean more government spending?”
”Where would we even put them all?”
”Isn’t this just just more bureaucracy? More corruption? More government to control us?

Let’s address these questions clearly and directly.

• Salaries and cost
  Yes, more members means more salaries, more benefits, more money to spend.
  But even if we doubled the house, adding another 435 new members, the total increase in cost would be a fraction of a percent, practically a rounding error in the federal budget.
  For a Congress that oversees trillions in spending, hundreds of millions of citizens, and a check on the power of the Executive and the Judiciary, this paltry amount buys something priceless: Accessibility, representation, and trust.
  If we can afford dozens of tanks we’ll never deploy, bases across the globe we’ll never close, we can afford a few hundred more chairs for the American people.
• Space in the Capitol
  The Capitol building’s architecture is no excuse to tolerate the intolerable.
  While it is true that the Capitol can, and every year does, hold close to this number
  Not all members should be in the chamber all at once during most regular days.
  A physical limit on the number of seats available is not a flaw. It is a strength.
  Let some representatives be in their districts, back in their home states.
  Let them walk the same grocery aisles with us
  Let them shake the hands of neighbors instead of lobbyists.
  Let them spend less time rubbing shoulders with bureaucrats in their marble halls, and more time rubbing elbows with the public they serve
  With modern technology, rotating sessions, and secure remote voting, we can reimagine a Congress that isn’t tethered to Washington, but anchored to their people.
• More Government = More Corruption
  I tell you now that more members can mean less concentrated power
  More representatives means:
• More diversity of voices
• More competition
• More, smaller districts less susceptible to gerrymandering
• More access for constituents 
• And perhaps most importantly, more trouble for lobbyists trying to buy influence in bulk
• Right now each house member represents nearly three-quarters of a million people on average. That is not a representative, that is a viceroy.
  Increasing the number shrinks that throne.
  It makes your representative your neighbor as they were always meant to be. 

Room for Reform

An expanded House doesn’t just increase our representation. It opens wide the window for experimentation.

With this drastic increase in representatives state would be free to be the laboratories of democracy once more. 

With more seats, states could:

• Pilot alternative voting methods in multi-member districts
• Create many more districts organized by culture and shared interests
• Adopt innovations like multi-member proportional representation, bringing even more fairness, flexibility, and completion into the process. 

We aren’t just given growth.
We are given possibility.