On Apr 15, 2011, at 8:59 PM, ⸘Ŭalabio‽ wrote:
“Owen Dalby” <[email protected]>:
I apologize if I am asking a dumb question, but would appreciate
any honest and practical advice from this list. I am conducting an
election among a group of colleagues who are all graduates of a
fellowship program. 45 people will vote on perhaps 30 candidates
for roughly 15 seats.
If these people are not paid, thus it costs group nothing for their
services, just let everyone wanting to have a seat. If money is an
issue, one should think about the ideal size of the legislature:
If the legislature has 1 tier, then the size of it should be the
squareroot of the electorate. The squreroot of 45 is:
7
how well does this work for a large population? if that rule applied
to the U.S., we would have about 17,500 in the House of
Representatives in Congress. might be a little unwieldy.
would there be some threshold where this rule changes to one where the
legislature is a smaller portion? i s'pose, if i think about it, i
can think up an asymptotic function that approximates sqrt(N) for
small N and k*N for large N where k is the constant of proportionality.
____
this is interesting. in the U.S., the number of Representatives is
435, no matter what the population is, but they have to be allocated
proportionally in some sense of the word. this is called
"apportionment" and is done to decide how many Representatives go to
each state. once that is done, states that are apportioned more than
one representative have to go through a another slugfest (which is
more local and more subjective) in how that state is Redistricted.
now that we have had a new census in the U.S., they're gonna do that
again. 10 years ago (after the 2000 census), there was some dispute
about the method because North Carolina felt they got screwed of
receiving the last apportioned Representative, which barely went to
Utah. (there is a geographic shift of the center of mass of the
population in the U.S toward the west. there was a sorta big deal or
milestone when this population centroid moved from east of the
Mississippi to west of it.)
anyway, the rule they currently use is this Huntington-Hill method.
and i've been wondering exactly how the mathematics work in deriving
it. as anonymous IP 96.237.148.44, i posted on 14 February 2009 (UTC)
a reasonably clear mathematical posing of the same question to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Huntington%E2%80%93Hill_method
using Wikipedia's LaTeX markup. so it's clearer there than here.
all's i can say is that the conceptually simplest method of
proportional allocation, with a fixed number of Representatives and
that guarantees each state a minimum of one Representative is:
Number of Reps for State k: N(k) = ceil( q*P(k) )
where
SUM{ N(k) } = N
k
and
SUM{ P(k) } = P
k
and where N is the total number of representatives (now 435 in the
U.S.) and P is the total population of the electorate (or of those
represented, in this case we're counting non-voters) and P(k) is the
population of each state.
q starts out as arbitrarily low (so the SUM{N(k)} is less than N) and
is monotonically increased until SUM{N(k)} is equal to N.
now, this just seems to me to be the most consistent rule that is
applied to every state that makes it proportional (to an integer
number of representatives for each state) and makes certain each state
gets at least one representative.
can someone explain to me how the Huntington-Hill method is better.
in this section:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_apportionment#The_Method_of_Equal_Proportions
they say it's because "the method ... minimizes the percentage
differences in the size of the congressional districts." can someone
point me to a proof of that? i asked the same question in that
article's Talk page and have been unsatisfied with the responses.
can anyone here (like Warren) spell this out? what so good about
sqrt(n*(n+1)) instead of just n?
thanx,
--
r b-j [email protected]
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
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