Imagine a Legislature with 11,000 Members

by Karl Kurtz

With a population of about 1.2 million (2000 census) and 400 members in its House of Representatives, New Hampshire has the smallest legislative districts in the country.  Recognizing that New Hampshire has many multi-member districts that make some constituencies larger, on average Granite State legislators represent 3,100 legislators.

California, which has only 40 members in its Senate and 80 in the Assembly, is at the opposite extreme:  Golden State senators have districts that average 847,000 people and Assembly members 424,000 constituents.

Struck by this extreme difference between the two states, Donald Manning, chief of staff to Speaker Terie Norelli in New Hampshire, calculated how many legislators the California Assembly would have if it followed the New Hampshire small district model.  The answer: 10,926! 

How would you like to be the party whip charged with counting votes in that legislature?

I took Donald's methodology of dividing the average size of New Hampshire House districts into total population one step further and calculated the size of the U.S. House.  The result is 91,842 members.

If you want to have some fun, take your state's population, divide it by 3,100, and you will get the size of your state's house of representatives according to the New Hampshire model.  For a much more serious discussion of the size of legislatures and legislative districts, see "What's the Right Size for a Legislature?"  You can find the size of each state's legislative districts here.

Comments

[Lurker]

Image in if they abolish multimember districts and parcel it out 1/district?

Also, the NH House used be even BIGGER (The Constitution mandated a rolling increase as the state population increased) however when they got close to the Federal House's size they decided that they couldn't upstage them and amended that out.

Also, check out the state Senate: 24!

And then there's that weird "Executive Council"...

[John]

A very good post