I'd love to hear anybody poke holes in this idea. It's a recent one for me. I'm sure they exist, but I haven't come up with them yet.
Obviously, there's the incentive for fraudulent votes. But there's already an incentive for fraudulent votes, and it doesn't seem to cause much of a problem.
Also, it seems to disadvantage populations that have disproportionate bias towards non-voting. I’m thinking areas of lower socioeconomic status, even with as many pro-voting initiatives as can be, will still ultimately be undercounted.
I really like the idea, but I'll volunteer to offer the criticism you'll probably hear.
If a state can give itself more power by counting more votes, then state governments which are confident that their dominant party will win will have a lot of incentive to allow fraudulent votes, and potentially a lot to gain.
For example, if the state government knows that 70% of voters will vote for the Yellow Party, then they can risk encouraging 10% of the population to cast, say, 4 extra votes (for their deceased grandparents), without worrying that the dreaded Purple Party might exploit this laxness and give Purple the win.
Combine that with some selective enforcement (so Purple voters know that, in practice, only they are at risk of prosecution for voter fraud) and the state will be able to magnify its relative strength compared to states that are more scrupulous.
The calculus of voter fraud will definitely change. But I don't know. In order for an individual to commit voter fraud, they have to believe that the benefit is worth the risk them as an individual.
And, for the individual, voter fraud would only "work" to the extent that they think everyone else will do it too.
I intuitively feel that voter fraud is a much bigger bogeyman than people make it out to be.
I think the bigger fear is corruption of the election commission; such that they turn a blind eye to or even contribute to voter fraud.
Of course, no system is incorruptible, and the test for acceptance shouldn't be perfection, but improvement over the status quo (this idea of iteration is the cornerstone of our constitution).
That being said, I'm not convinced that the voter fraud risk makes this proposal more corrupt than the system we currently have. Voter fraud is an easier problem to solve than voter suppression, IMO.
Once there is even a suggestion that some state might be increasing its power by encouraging voter fraud, there will be an arms race of other states trying to "counteract" this by encouraging their own voter fraud.
So, if 80% of you 100-seat state votes, 80% voted X and 20% voted Y, you'd get 64 X's and 16 Y's.
This way, both parties are incentivized to vote. Instead of today.
In my opinion, it's harmful to our democracy that members of the "losing party" feel zero incentive to turn out on election day. It encourages disengagement and disillusionment, not to mention the polarization of the electorate.
In Germany, the "crazy parties" get some seats, so their voices are heard. It has a pacification affect on the mainstream parties.
You've just taken all the complexity of counting people every 10 years and rejiggering the numbers, and now made it nightmarishly more complex given that you're transitioning into that system in the first place.
Furthermore, you're over emphasizing the structural elements (net representatives votes) instead of the important bit, that everyone has an ear to tug to get something listened to up high. You're entitled to an input. Not to skewing the structuring function to optimize for voter population density, neither directly via tinkering with the effective representation calculation, or indirectly via the change you suggested.
It's not a terrible idea to be honest, but there is a degree of simplicity to the way we do it now, and I have the feeling yours would be a hard sell to the average American, or even the above average ones without substantially more in detail analysis.
In theory, there is a (somewhat dated, given other evolutions in voting rights) remedy for that in Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment, though it can be hacked aroundt by selective criminalization (though that, in theory, is limited by Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment).
Unfortunately, neither of these has been very well enforced, especially Section 2.
Unfortunately, in the present political climate, any reasonable interpretation of these words that hurts the representation of states with regressive voting laws would be seen as an act of politics.
The nice thing about my proposed hack, is that it also incentivizes decriminalization, or at least allowing a broader class of humans in your state to vote. In this way, it doesn't matter if the 14th amendment is well-enforced, because it changes the goal posts.
So, while it might not give felons the vote (this would violate the 14th), it will encourage the dissolution of our current "justice" system that arbitrarily incarcerates people.
If your state incarcerates people for "driving while black", it is effectively diluting its representation in the congress and electoral college.
We've been misinterpreting words like "infringed" and "papers, and effects" for well over a century. The current climate while certainly non-helpful but I think there's a deeper root cause that keeps us from strongly enforcing the constitution.
Sadly, it's more likely that both political parties are simply comfortable with the status quo.
The republican party thinks they can gerrymander and voter-suppress their way to power.
The democratic party thinks they can let the republican party self-destruct, since most of their tactics to hold on to power are illegal, especially as the demographics of our country's states become overwhelmingly out of their favor.
But regardless of which party you belong to, I think universal suffrage is one of those rare principles that every American grows up believing in.
As such, especially in 2020, it makes perfect sense to base federal representation on such a shared principle. It would definitely have the effect of moderating our society. It is a natural evolution of a concept we already have (proportional representation). It does away with the grimy roots of that concept (ceding representation to slaveholders).
So, maybe one day.
The southern states benefited from emancipation, insofar as they gained seats in the house and electoral college (they got a 5/3 multiple on their prior proportions, which had only narrowly elected Lincoln pewar).
This redistribution of postwar power led to the disaster of 1877 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compromise_of_1877, something we're still grappling with to this day.
One motivation for Jim Crow laws was to keep the southern voting-sampled portion of the south white and segregationist (in spite of the true distribution of local sentiment), while simultaneously benefiting from the larger population in magnifying their representation in national politics.
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If I were dictator for a day, I'd make the number of house and electoral college seats directly proportional to the last-n-election-cycle-average of number of participating voters (not population!).
This change would flip the voter suppression script, which I think has been one of the more troubling developments in the last 100 years of our republic. It would also rightfully suppress the influence of the regions in this country that wish it was still the 1830s, but give them a path to return to influence that's contingent on uniting their polities.
We'd see states competing to make voting more accessible in a nonpartisan manner, because every state wants to have more representation in the electoral college and the congress, regardless of which party is in power.
This would force parties to actually represent their neighbors, whom they can safely ignore and suppress today.
With this change as an example, I think the Electoral College could actually be leveraged to steer our system in more inclusive direction. I'd love to simulate this version of history.