General discussion about Congressional Apportionment

[muon2]

Ok, so if they are able to vote in their State of origin, the inclusion of overseaers is legitimate. Obviously, all that would be easily solved if a "americans overseas" district (or several, according to their number : 6 milions would give them 9 seats) were created.

I didn't know the existence of the harmonic mean, and I've no idea what it is. Could you explain me better what it consists in ? Thanks.

The harmonic mean was popular with the ancient Greeks, since it had nice geometric properties. In modern use it might come up in a problem like this:

Antonio walks from his house to the post office at a speed of 2 km/hour and returns at a speed of 3 km/hr. What is his average speed during the round trip?

The answer is not 2.5 km/hr, but instead it is the harmonic mean of 2 and 3 which is 12/5= 2.4 km/hr. If the post office were 3 km away it would take 1.5 hours to get there and 1 hour to return at total of 2.5 hours. The round trip is 6 km, so the average speed is 6 km/2.5 hr = 2.4 km/hr.

[muon2]

Also, Nevada wouldn't have had a single representative in the U.S. House under the methods used at the time with no floor for much of its time as a state, stretching through 1930s reapportionment and I believe through the 1940s reaportionment if the Congressional Dems hadn't switched from major fractions to equal proportions in 1941 to prevent then-solidly Democratic Arkansas from losing a seat to then-Republican-leaning Michigan.

True, but Nevada was granted Statehood way too early so as to gin up three Union electoral votes in 1864.  Had it not been for concerns over the Confederacy and the Mormons, it would have been better to have split Nevada between Utah and California and then split California into a North and South California.  Of course had that happened, there never would have been a Las Vegas.

Las Vegas might have happened anyway. Without the state of Nevada, the Clark county area was part of New Mexico territory. It wasn't even part of NV until 2 years after statehood. This is an 1857 map of NM terr: