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Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

Each congressperson's staff gathers all of the comments they get, counts them up, and reports back to the congressperson, passing along anything they think would be useful information; if you write a clear and careful letter about an obscure topic there's a decent chance the congressperson themself will see it. Congresspeople typically have local ties in their area and caring what their constituents think is their job.

It's a serious problem that there are some congresspeople who don't do any local events, send all comments straight to the trash, etc. You should vote those folks out.

In the longer term, we should push for significantly increasing the size of the US House of Representatives to 5–10x the current size and implement serious campaign finance reforms. In combination, these will help make congresspeople more responsive to constituents and less reliant on donors.

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Not an American, but I've wondered about increasing numbers myself. Certainly, giving each representative fewer citizens to represent could help.

I worry about the size of the bodies, however. Too big, and they become less wieldy. Maybe I'm wrong, but I wonder about other solutions. I was thinking of, for example, 10x the number, but each grouping of 10 has a representative, and they each give proxies on votes. Maybe best though of as, junior representatives. It'd allow more direct interaction, and in a sense you'd be electing regional representative staff for each congressperson.

I guess there are a lot of ways to handle this, but regardless I overall 100% agree.

With modern electronics I really don't see why we can't have arbitrary numbers of representatives.

In fact I think my preferred system would be representatives get a number of votes equal to the people who voted for them, and anyone can assign anyone as their representative. Gate things like getting speaking time on representing more than x% of the vote, and maybe even have a minimum threshold if we're insisting votes are cast in person for cyber security reasons, but generally the bar for being able to represent people should be low and there shouldn't be winners and losers in elections but just people who represent different numbers of people.

The modern democracy is unchanged from original Ancient Greek version to adapt to having 100,000 voters per representative from 100 when democracy was invented. It was never questioned if it supposed to work at this scale.

They become more unwieldy, but that might be the point.

Fuck congress. They are dead weight. Fuck the president too. Bring back anarchism.

A 10x increase would just be chaos.

How is a body of 4,350 representatives going to function?

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