Scaling up the constitution

Among the myriad problems American have because of their obsolete constitution, one of the most annoying is the utter lack of scalability of our system of representative democracy. Try to imagine this if you will: when the Constitution was composed, there were only 26 Senators and 65 Representatives. There were around four million American in the first census of 1790, which means that each Representive, on average, represented a little more than 60,000 Americans; after the census, the number of House seats was increased to 106, or about 38,000 citizens per Representative. At present, there are 100 Senators (still not too bad a number, and of course in the same relation to the number of states as in 1790), and 435 Representatives. However, the population has increased to around 300,000,000, so each Representative now represents 690,000 people, an increase of over 18 times from the number set after the first census.

Furthermore, the number of representatives per citizen varies a great deal by state. Oregon, whose population is roughly equal to that of the United States in 1790, has five representatives, compared to 106 for the same number of citizens in the beginning. The least populous state, Wyoming, has one representative and 521,000 citizens; another sparsely populated state, Montana, has one representative and 958,000 citizens, almost twice as many.