Talk:Wyoming Rule

Sites mentioning the Wyoming Rule

Sites mentioning the Wyoming Rule:

• http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/13/13260/2764
• http://www.makemyvotecount.org.uk/blog/archives/lewis_baston/index.html
• http://www.poliblogger.com/?p=8823
• http://astuteblogger.blogspot.com/2005/12/decennial-re-apportionment-and-census.html
• http://www.ubiquit.us/blog/archives/2005/01/a_bad_idea.html

Captain Zyrain 19:19, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

AfD

I closed this AfD, with result of keep by clear consensus, as notable and sourced enough. Bearian 19:56, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Wyoming Rule. Bearian 19:57, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

5000 Representatives

American Samoa has about 57,000 inhabitants. So if American Samoa became an official state of the USA, the size of the United States House of Representatives would raise to 5,000 according to the Wyoming rule. Markus Schulze 10:17, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure that idea is seriously being considered for electoral reform in American Samoa. Captain Zyrain 10:43, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Well, I don't think that electoral reform in American Samoa has something to do with the size of the United States House of Representatives. Markus Schulze 11:12, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Actually, it does. The Wyoming Rule is called the Wyoming Rule (and not the American Samoa Rule) because Wyoming is the smallest state. Territories != states. 108.9.113.171 (talk) 22:34, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

The small population of American Samoa is probably the biggest reason not to consider American Samoa for Statehood. —Tamfang (talk) 23:52, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

Serious editing needed

This article is badly written and it seemed like someone edited the sections alone. There's some contradiction in the article as well. In the opening section, it says that according to the 2010 Census, if the US House were to implement the rule, it would result in 547 members, yet in the following section, it says that 542 members would need to be seated. In this case, the section is correct, but the opening section is wrong (notice the way Montana's population shifts from one paragraph to the next).

The Wyoming Rule implemented in the current House should be placed as a table and the explanation of cost per seat removed (that's not relevant if the point it to highlight the changes in House seats, not to find which state has more voting power over the other).

Einsteinboricua (talk) 20:29, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

My own math, as well as this article, suggests that the size of the chamber would be 542, not 547, using the 2010 Census figures and the "Wyoming Rule." See https://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=apportionment The issue is the quirky Huntington-Hill method. MrArticleOne (talk) 21:29, 3 November 2020 (UTC)

A good portion of this article is original research and should be removed outright. However, by my calculation, 547 was the number for 1990 and 545 was the number for 2010. Keep in mind (and this is the danger of OR) that the apportionment population includes federal workers overseas, which is above and beyond the regular census population; I believe the 542 number originates from not taking that into account. —Gordon P. Hemsley→✉ 03:32, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

When I did my own calculations that came to 542—which I freely acknowledge was OR, I wasn't doing it for Wikipedia but just my own curiosity—I was working off of the official Census table giving each state's "apportionment population." See https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2011/dec/c2010br-08.pdf The Huntington-Hill method they use just produces quirky results since it is not bound by the quota rule. MrArticleOne (talk) 05:09, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

The difficulty with your method, GPHemsley, is that under the Huntington-Hill method, Wyoming "earns" its seat a few seats before the average district size is down to Wyoming's population. MrArticleOne (talk) 05:11, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

You are correct that I am maintaining the use of the Huntington–Hill method in my calculations, which your earlier citation (dated 2017) apparently does not do; this is because the current law requires the use of "the method known as the method of equal proportions". Most of the early references to the Wyoming Rule that I've been able to find date back to circa 2005 ([1] [2] [3]), at which time the 2000 Census was the latest available data. Those blog posts, as well as my calculations, indicate a House size of 569. (Taylor's arrival at 568 is an error of arithmetic, and does not, as one comment suggests, have anything to do with allocating a seat to DC, which is not happening in the calculations at hand.) Interestingly, however, there is a discrepancy between how those seats are allocated: the posts that mention California indicate that it would be allocated 69 seats, and Taylor's breakdown further indicates that Hawaii would get 2; my calculations, and those already present in this article's "Historical House sizes" table, indicate that California would get 68 seats and Hawaii would get 3. I don't know enough about the other apportionment methods, and I haven't performed any additional calculations, but it may well be from the difference in algorithm that you cite, which may then happen to be further exacerbated when looking at 1990 or 2010 data. If that is true, however, then the "Historical House sizes" table in this article is not internally consistent, as it would then otherwise be expected to align with my calculations. —Gordon P. Hemsley→✉ 07:19, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

Removing "Effect on the Electoral College"

Much of this article is already the subject of WP:OR. Given that discussion about how the application of the Wyoming Rule would affect the Electoral College is speculation on top of that OR (WP:NOT), and given that the entire section was written without citations by a single author (Rupertslander), I have decided to be bold and remove the entire section. —Gordon P. Hemsley→✉ 07:41, 17 January 2021 (UTC)