| Description |
In the latest round of House apportionment following the 2020 Census, the state of New York lost a seat by an extremely small margin: if a mere 89 people were added to the state’s 20 million population, it would have kept the seat. Political observers pointed to the Census’s tendency to undercount minority and immigrant populations as the primary culprit. However, New York’s seat loss is as much as an issue of apportionment as it is of counting: the current apportionment method used by the federal government, Huntington-Hill’s method, is biased against the more populous states such as New York. If an alternative apportionment method were used, such as Webster’s method, New York would also have kept the seat. This article discusses four historical apportionment methods – Hamilton’s method, Huntington-Hill’s method, Jefferson’s method, and Webster’s method. These methods are then evaluated against three criteria of within-quota, consistency, and unbiasedness. The article proceeds to show that Huntington-Hill’s method has produced biased apportionment results in eight out of nine apportionments since its official adoption in 1941. It concludes with the recommendation of replacing the current apportionment method with the only unbiased divisor method: Webster’s method.
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