If the electoral college trend were to hold for next 100 years

[Kevinstat]

One interesting thought: What if Congress drew Congressional districts?  Subject to the President's veto (which could be overrided by a 2/3 majority in each house) of course.

On first glance that would seem to make the potential for gerrymandering worse since if one party controlled the federal government it could gerrymander every state's districts to it's advantage (currently gerrymandering by different parties in different states can at least somewhat cancel itself out - Republicans did really well in the 2000 state legislative elections so that didn't happen as much, but at least New York state couldn't be gerrymandered to their benifit).  If a nationwide Maine/Nebraska method was used, the governing party could thus arguably cement its hold on the Presidency as well as the lower house of Congress.  Now that the Supreme Court has ruled that redistricting can occur more than once a decade (I don't think there's any limit now to how often a state can redraw its congressional districts; if I'm wrong can somebody tell me), the governing national party could "re-gerrymander" (a term I'm sure has been used to desribe Texas Congressional redistricting) district lines in a state if and when their earlier plan seems not to be working for them anymore given unexpected political trends.  Or a party could draw a plan which they are only fully confident will ensure their majority through the next election, and then draw another plan if and where necessary to ensure their majority though the next election, and so on.  But such nationwide gerrymandering by one party would likely be very unpopular, especially since the party couldn't point to the other party doing it too at the same time in other states, so the costs to the national majority party of exteme gerrymandering could outweigh the benefits.  And if the constitutional amendment giving Congress authority to redistrict itself included an explicit restriction of redistricting to between the xyz0 and xyz2 elections, a national political party trying to ensure its majority for the remainder of the decade would have to make guesses about what the partisan ballance throughout each state they were gerrymandering would be throughout the ensueing decade.  If, by [xyz+1]0, the party which was the victim of the gerrymandering in xyz1 or early xyz2 was preferred over the other party by a greater margin than say, 52% to 48% nationwide, it would likely have control of at least one house of Congress or the Presidency at the end of that year.  It would then be able to protect itself against gerrymandering for the next decade, or exact revenge on the other party through gerrymandering of its own if it controlled the Presidency and each house of Congress and, perhaps a less extreme gerrymandering which would teach the opposition party not to take so great an advantage of its power again without being so bad as to continue the cycle of extreme nationwide gerrymandering whenever it is possible.  Perhaps I'm a dreamer, but it's an interesting dream to have (not that I had an actual dream about this, but you know what I mean).

One final thing.  I think a Congressional district method of choosing electors to the electoral college would be better if each state had only as many electoral votes as it had U.S. Representatives.  That way there would be rough equality in voting representation and power both in the lower-level math sense (the number of electors each voter can vote for divided by number of voters voting for that elector or those electors) and the higher-level math sense (the number of electors each voter can vote for divided by the square root of the number of voters voting for that elector or those electors, which is a better indicator of how much chance voters in different states or other units of election of Presidential electors have relative to each other of affecting the outcome of the election).  In the lower-level math sense the larger states are currently cheated, but in the higher-level math sense they have it really good as their voters gain more power as a whole by their larger number of electors (then the smaller states) being grouped together, and that benefit would generally, assuming random political ballances throughout the several states (which I know it isn't random, but it is still a good key), outweigh the benefit to the smaller states of having more electoral votes per capita.  Having a Congressional district method without the two statewide "Senatorial" electors would eliminate each of these two benefits certain states have over others based on their size.

[Kevinstat]

Montana does not have 1/100 of the United States population.  As of the 2000 census, it had just under 1/311 or 1.40/435 of the United States resident population (not counting DCs resident population in the denominator) and just over 1/311 or still just under 1.40/435 of the United States apportionment population, which includes oversees population.  It had 1.51/435 of the United States resident population (which was eqivilent to apportionment population back then, as overseas population was only included in the apportionment population once before the 1990 census) as of the 1980 census, and had 2 representatives in Congress, so they were overrepresented in the U.S. House of Representatives by 32.39% back then while they are underrepresented in the House by only 28.54% now based on their apportionment population or by 28.44% based on their resident population.  Montana is currently overrepresented in the Electoral College by 73.69% based on its percentage of what the United States apportionment population would be if the District of Columbia was included and by 73.94% based on its percentage of the United States resident population.  Of course now it likely has less real power than average as it has a smaller number of electors who are elected in a slate, but my plan would get rid of that as well and would each congressional district one electoral vote.  Congressional districts wouldn't likely be ignored based on the size of the state they belong to, but based on how solid they seem for one candidate or another.  It would be like the U.K.'s Westminster system in a way.

I live in the less competitive of Maine's two congressional districts, although I would still hear advertising for the second district as I currently do as that district stretches well into the Portland media market which includes the Augusta area where I live, but my vote would be slightly less likely to affect the choice of an elector or electoral slate than it is now in a close election (two of Maine's four electors are still elected statewide now, you know).  That's okay with me as I know that inequality vis-a-vis more competitive congressional districts would be based on the different voting preferences of voters in my congressional district compared to those in routinely closer congressional districts, not systematic as the current method of allocation and election of Presidential electors is (well, I guess each state could hypothetically have the same population and number of voters, but that's kind of different in my opinion).

[Kevinstat]

jimrtex,

Were some of the concurences in judgement of certain U.S. Supreme Court Justices on the 2005 case regarding the 2003 or 2004 Texas congressional redistricting, ... did any justices basically say that the second redrawing of the lines (not getting into the issue of TX-23) was only okay because the first drawing wasn't done by the Legislature?  I know certain Republicans have said that while fuming against Democratic attempts to redistrict Ohio by citizen initiave while justifying the 2003 Texas redistricting, but I'm curious if any Supreme Court Justices (like Scalia perhaps) came to that conclusion.

[Kevinstat]

By the way, jimrtex, thanks for the info on how the District method was previously done.  So those districts would have always been smaller than the state's congressional districts.  Perhaps Lewis Trondheim (or whatever he goes by nowadays) or one of our other map-happy members could start a thread on dividing each state into Presidential elector districts with no at-Large electors.

If each state elected all of its presidential electors by single-member districts, and assuming the same percentage of citizens voted in each state (obviously not true, but good for making my point), a voter in state with exactly 1/435 of the U.S. population would have 189% more representation in the electoral college per capita than a voter in a state with exactly 53/55 of the U.S. population (that ratio would not be changed by electing any or all of a state's electors by districts, only within a state if the districts were substantially unequal in population per elector), but only 70% more voting power using the higher-level math I described in my first post on this thread.  That is slightly less equitable than if both states used the Maine-Nebraska method, in which the voter in the smaller of those two states would have only 43% more voting power.  Currently, a voter in the larger of those two states would have almost 152% more voting power than a voter in the smaller state even if there was no correlation between what state an elector is from and who that elector votes for for President.  With that correlation and either of the two most commonly used power indexes for weighted voting (the states effectively having weighted votes), I'm sure the current mathematical disparity in power in favor of voters in larger states is even greater.  Voters in the larger states benefit not only from electing a greater number of electors in a group but from the fact that those electors can be expected, with an occasional exeption or two in any given election, to vote together on the only two votes they cast.  That same second factor would come in to play to a lesser degree with the Maine-Nebraska method, only this time to the benefit of the smaller states as an individual district elector from a state with few Congressional districts would be more likely to be an elector for the same ticket as the state's two at-large electors than would be an elector from a state with more Congressional districts.  So the increased power a voter from a state with exactly 1/435 of the U.S. population would have over a voter from a state with exactly 53/435 of the population would actually likely be slightly greater than 43%.  But such a plan would still likely be more equitable based on state size than having all of a state's electors elected by districts.