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The Huntington–Hill method, sometimes called method of equal proportions, is a highest averages method for assigning seats in a legislature to political parties or states. [1] Since 1941, this method has been used to apportion the 435 seats in the United States House of Representatives following the completion of each decennial census .
[1] [2] More generally, divisor methods are used to round shares of a total to a fraction with a fixed denominator (e.g. percentage points, which must add up to 100). [2] The methods aim to treat voters equally by ensuring legislators represent an equal number of voters by ensuring every party has the same seats-to-votes ratio (or divisor).
Allocation of seats by state, as percentage of overall number of representatives in the House, 1789–2020 census. United States congressional apportionment is the process [1] by which seats in the United States House of Representatives are distributed among the 50 states according to the most recent decennial census mandated by the United States Constitution.
Mathematically, an apportionment method is just a method of rounding real numbers to natural numbers. Despite the simplicity of this problem, every method of rounding suffers one or more paradoxes, as proven by the Balinski–Young theorem. The mathematical theory of apportionment identifies what properties can be expected from an apportionment ...
The writers of the Constitution designed the nation's bicameral Legislature to include, a Senate (the upper legislative chamber) to represent the states, and a House of Representatives (the lower legislative chamber) to represent the people rather than the states. Each state—in its entirety—is equally represented in the Senate by two ...
Edmund Randolph's Virginia Plan called for a bicameral Congress: the lower house would be "of the people", elected directly by the people of the United States and representing public opinion, and a more deliberative upper house, elected by the lower house, that would represent the individual states, and would be less susceptible to variations ...
The House can elect a new speaker at any time if the person occupying that role dies, resigns or is removed from office. Barring that, a speaker is normally elected at the start of a new Congress.
They show a proof of impossibility: apportionment methods may have a subset of these properties, but cannot have all of them: A method may be free of both the Alabama paradox and the population paradox. These methods are divisor methods, and Huntington–Hill, the method currently used to apportion House of Representatives seats, is one of them ...