Category Archives: House of Representatives

Redistricting 2021 — The Numbers

By tmess2 | Published May 1, 2021

On Monday, four days ahead of its latest target date and almost four months behind the statutory date, the Census Bureau released the national and state-level results from the Census including the apportionment numbers that determine how many representatives each get.  As can be expected, there are multiple different tables summarizing the data in different ways for us number geeks.

The bottom line table shows the apportionment population (both those living in the state and those residing overseas — like military personnel — who call that state home), the number of representatives that each state is getting, and the change in representation.   We will get back to the change in a minute, but the big level number is that the apportionment population is slightly over 331 million.  As such, the average size (mean) of each congressional district is just under 761 thousand.  Alaska, Vermont, and Wyoming have fewer people than the average congressional district.  While the apportionment formula does not work for calculating the population needed for the first representative, even Wyoming has enough population to be entitled to three-quarters of a representative.

If, D.C. and Puerto Rico were states, Puerto Rico would be just ahead of Utah (which has four representatives) and just behind Connecticut (which has five representatives) and D.C. would be between Vermont and Alaska.  Given that Puerto Rico is only slightly larger than Utah (which was not close to getting a fifth representative and far enough behind Connecticut, Puerto Rico would be due for four representatives.  If  both were states, the five states that would lose a representative would have been Oregon, Colorado, and Montana (all of which gained a seat), California (which lost a seat), and Minnesota (which barely avoided losing a seat).  The chart of priority values that allows us to consider the impact of adding Puerto Rico and D.C. also shows that Minnesota barely held onto its last seat and New York barely lost its seat.  Apparently, given the formula, Minnesota would have lost that seat if it had 24 fewer people, and New York would have kept its seat if it had 89 more people.  (The disparity in numbers is caused by the fact that the two states have different number of seats. Continue Reading...

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Redistricting 2021 — A Preview

By tmess2 | Published April 24, 2021

As long time readers of this site know, back in 2011, we took a rather detailed look at the redistricting process.  While we will once again be looking at redistricting, redistricting is going to be a little bit different in 2021 than it was in 2011.

We are nearing the end of the pre-redistricting period.  This period roughly covers the four years preceding redistricting (Summer of the year ending in 7 through January of the year ending in 1).  There are two basic things happening during this period.

On the political side, during these four years, we are, in most states, electing the state representatives, state senators, and governors who will pass the new redistricting plans.  In other states, we are making decisions about the laws that will govern “independent” commissions that will draw up the new districts.  We are now, with limited exceptions for filling vacancies, past this phase.  It is too late to make changes to state constitutions to alter the rules for redistricting.  In states that leave it to the legislative process, the elections for those positions are done and the winners are in office and have the power. Continue Reading...

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House Election Contests

By tmess2 | Published March 23, 2021

Right now Republicans are trying to spin the House’s review of the results in Iowa’s Second District race.  But here is what the Republicans are not saying.

First, the Iowa race is not the only race pending in the House.  The Republican candidate in the Fourteenth District of Illinois has also filed an election contest even though he lost by more than 1,000 votes.  By contrast, the margin in Iowa is only six votes.  Yet Republicans have only attempted to dismiss the Iowa contest.

Second, election contests are not unusual.  While most election contests go nowhere, losing candidates sometimes file election contests.  Over the past ninety years, there have been 100 election contests filed. Continue Reading...

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Why Congress has authority over Federal Elections

By tmess2 | Published March 20, 2021

As Republicans in swing states seem to be dedicated to winning elections by keeping Democrats from voting rather than persuading people to vote Republicans, Democrats in Congress are pushing the “For the People Act.”  Some of the provisions in this Act will prevent states from suppressing the vote in federal elections.  The House version has already passed and it seems that Senate version may be the bill that forces a showdown over the future of the filibuster.

One of the critiques that the conservative media establishment has made of this bill is that it involves a takeover of elections by Congress.  This critique, however, ignores the plain language of the Constitution.  Congress has full authority over elections to Congress.  Specifically, Article I, Section 4 permits the states to make laws about congressional elections but it expressly grants authority to Congress to “at any time by law make or alter such regulations” as the states have enacted.  However, Congress has, for the most part, opted against fully using its authority because it hasn’t felt the need to do so.

In explaining the need for this power, the authors of The Federalist Papers noted that, without this Congressional power, state governments would be able to frustrate the federal government by simply failing to hold elections.  And we are currently seeing, in real time, an example of what state control over elections can mean for Congress. Continue Reading...

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2022 Elections — A First Glance

By tmess2 | Published January 30, 2021

The 2020 elections left both the House and the Senate closely divided.  And two years is a long time in politics.  But experience has taught politicians two, somewhat contradictory, things that will impact what can get done during the next two years.

The first, especially for the House of Representatives, is that the President’s party typically loses seats.  But the reason for this normal rule is that a new President has typically helped members of his party to flip seats.  As such, this might be less true for 2022 than in the past.  In 2020, the Democrats only won three new seats, and two were the results of North Carolina having to fix its extreme gerrymander.  And only a handful of Democratic incumbents won close races.  And the rule is less consistent for the Senate, in large part because the Senators up for election are not the ones who ran with the President in the most recent election but the ones who ran with the prior president six years earlier.  In other words, the President’s party tends to be more vulnerable in the Senate in the midterms of the second term than in the midterms of the first term.  But the likelihood that the President’s party will lose seats is an incentive to do as much as possible during the first two years.

The second is that one cause of the swing may be overreach — that voters are trying to check a President who is going further than the voters actually wanted.  This theory assumes that there are enough swing voters who really want centrist policies and that they switch sides frequently to keep either party from passing more “extreme” policies.  Polls do not really support this theory and there is an argument that, at least part of the mid-term problem, could be the failure to follow through on all of the promises leading to less enthusiasm with the base.  But this theory is a reason for taking things slowly and focusing on immediate necessities first and putting the “wish list” on hold until after the mid-terms. Continue Reading...

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The Last Race

By tmess2 | Published January 24, 2021

Before we head into several special elections to fill vacancies, there is still one Congressional race to be decided (putting aside any election contests that are pending in the House).  That race is New York’s Twenty-Second District.   What is happening in upstate New York is (and should be) an embarrassment.

The problem in the race is absentee ballots and “affidavit ballots” (what most states call provisional ballots).  In New York, the duty for canvassing such ballots — determining which ones are valid and counting them — falls on county boards of election.  If a candidate disagrees with the ruling of the board of election, the candidate can object to that decision and file a petition with the local “supreme court” (the trial court in New York).  The board of election is then required to make a record of the objection and submit that ballot to the court for review.

In conducting his review, the trial judge found that all of the county boards (eight counties are fully or partially in the Twenty-Second District) had failed to handle the canvass process properly, but the biggest failures have been in Oneida County.  Originally, the Oneida County Board simply rejected all affidavit ballots without even examining them.  The trial court had ordered the board to actually canvass these ballots. Continue Reading...

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The Unfinished Civil Rights Agenda — The Commonwealth of Douglass and the State of Puerto Rico

By tmess2 | Published January 18, 2021

Today, we celebrate the legacy of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.  And appropriately, later this month, we will see one of his successors, the Reverend Raphael Warnock sworn in as a United States Senator from Georgia.

But there is a lot of work still to be done.  And while I could probably write a much longer essay on the full civil rights agenda, I am going to limit this post to a very key symbolic part of the agenda.  Voting Rights was a key part of the King agenda.  And, while other parts of the voting rights agenda are important, today — over 4 million Americans are being denied the most basic of rights, voting representation in the House and the Senate.

At the time of the framing, the United States had vast, mostly unsettled territories.  Even in the states, the settlements were mostly limited to the coasts.  However, between 1784 and 1787, the original Congress under the Articles of Confederation adopted a series of ordinances related to the Northwest Territories (what are currently the states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin) that governed the settlement of those territories and their ultimate admission to statehood.  Under those ordinances, a territory was eligible for statehood when it had population in excess of sixty thousand people. Continue Reading...

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Census Watch 2021

By tmess2 | Published December 18, 2020

As folks who have followed this website for a long time know, the decennial census is something that I consider to be a very big deal.  And, while perhaps not as detailed as we did it back in 2011, I am hoping that we will do something as the numbers come out in the spring about what the numbers might mean for our chances at keeping and increasing the Democratic majority in the House.

Redistricting involves two action at the federal level and at the state level.  At the federal level, the results of the census are use to determine how many representatives each state gets (often referred to as apportionment).  At the state level, assuming that a state has more than one representatives, redistricting involves drawing the lines so that each district has roughly the same population (no more than a 5% gap between the largest and smallest district and preferably smaller).   At the current time, of course, we are dealing with actions at the federal level.  The ball only shifts to the state level once apportionment has occurred and the Census Bureau has released the detailed count (breaking population down to census blocks) to each individual state on a rolling basis.

The federal part of the process comes first and involves two steps:  one involving raw data and the other involving the application of a formula to that data.    The first step is the census finalizing its state level population numbers. According to federal law, by January 1, the Census Bureau is supposed to report its numbers to Secretary of Commerce who is to forward those numbers to the president.  Upon receipt of those numbers, the President is to calculate the number of representatives that each state is entitled to and, by January 10,  forward a statement setting forth the population of each state and the number of representatives that each state will have in the next Congress.  The calculation is done by the “method of equal proportions” (one of several mathematical formulas used to “fairly” allocate partial seats). Continue Reading...

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Congressional Election Contests

By tmess2 | Published November 25, 2020

Under the Constitution, each house is the final judge over any dispute related to the election and seating of members.  Fortunately, this power is only rarely invoked.  But we may be facing one (or more) of those rare instances this year.

As this post is going live, we are in the midst of a recount for Iowa’s second congressional district.  Each county is individually certifying their recount.  Most of the counties have certified the new numbers, but a handful have not yet made their numbers official.  Based on the official numbers from the counties that have certified the recount result and the original count from the remaining counties, the margin is 35 votes.  But unofficial reports from the remaining counties show a swing of 36 votes which would mean that the Democrat would win by 1 vote.  Of interest in Iowa is the law governing recounts.  The law allows each county to choose between a hand recount or a machine recount or, maybe, a hybrid recount (in which ballots which are kicked out as overvotes or undervotes are examined to see if there is a valid vote).    These differences between the counties means that the final result from Iowa will differ from what a full hand recount would have shown or what a full machine recount would have shown.  And that invites further review.

Likewise, it seems like the race in New York’s twenty-second district is also close.  Because New York counties are not required to report interim counts, we will not know the final counts officially until all of the counties certify their results.  Some of the counties have officially released their current counts, but, in other counties, reporters are relying on sources to report the state of the count.  It appears that the race in New York is as close or almost as close as the race in Iowa.  Currently, final results are up in the air as the courts have been asked to review provisional ballots to determine which ones should be counted (and, apparently, one county used post-it notes to distinguish between the already counted ballots and the rejected ballots and those post-it notes fell off in transport). Continue Reading...

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Tomorrow’s Massachusetts Primary

By DocJess | Published August 31, 2020

Tomorrow is the Massachusetts primary. It’s a fascinating microcosm of campaigns. If you’re a political junkie (LIKE ME!) you’ve been following it really closely. While the 4th CD is a complete toss up (with a bunch of good options), the 1st CD is a battle between a really good guy (Richie Neal) who is being challenged by a guy who skirted the (possibly fake) sexual accusations against him.

Sometimes these challenges make sense — notably this year, Eliot Engel’s loss. Which was no great loss in the grand scheme of things: Engel was not that productive, and he’d lost touch with his District. But Richie Neal? One of the authors of the ACA, and the new NAFTA, Chair of Ways and Means. With a great body of legislative accomplishment that have been good for his district and for the nation. Challenger Alex Morse has said he would have voted against the CARES Act. He felt it didn’t go far enough. This shows a complete naivete of both necessity and political process. You want to be aspirational? Fine. But don’t do it when people need immediate financial relief from disaster. Morse believed that $600 a week wasn’t enough, and the $1,200 wasn’t enough…too many Alex Morses and no one would have gotten anything because those were the top numbers the House was going to be able to wrest from the Senate.

And then there’s the Ed Markey – Joe Kennedy Senate primary, which is actually the race, as the victor will win the seat in November. It’s astounding to me that Kennedy is challenging Markey not so much on issue grounds (their views are similar, although where there is a difference, Markey is more left than Kennedy) but because he’s OLD. No one ever says Ruth Bader Ginsburg is too old, as an aside. Continue Reading...

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