Four Hundred Thirty-Five
The Will of the People
I last wrote on Sunday 8 June 2014 about re-forming the electorate. Since that time, I have been doing some small bit of research and seriously considering attempting to write a ballot initiative to reform the size of the California State Assembly which has a population to representative ratio that is only marginally better than that of the Congress of the United States, marginally. There is a lot of talk about reforming voting and redistricting most of which fails to answer the basic question, can 80 people adequately reflect the will of 38,340,000 people for California or 435 people adequately reflect the will of 318,195,000 people?
In my gut, I have to answer, no. I have a fairly good political sense. I called the first Gulf War in econ class in high school in the early 1980s at the height of the Reagan Anti-Communist-Saber-Rattling. I foresaw the current state of the GOP in the late 1980s. So no, I fundamentally believe that 435 persons cannot adequately reflect the will of 318,195,000, just look at the current state of our union and tell me I am wrong.