> If you made the House an even number, they might have ties, so then they would need a way to break ties.
The House can and does have ties, even with an odd number of members; members abstaining or missing votes in the House are more common in the House than the EC.
You could extend the same EC voting arrangement to, say, (to pick an odd number of territories) Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands as D.C. has now.
Or adopt D.C. statehood, in which case then you have an odd number in the House + an even number in the Senate + zero.
That would only add two, unless you also had a reapportionment act. Same with adding Puerto Rico as a state.
Edit: As pointed out below, this is wrong. Since DC already has 3, it would actually lower the number by one, so this would in fact give an odd number.
> The House can and does have ties, even with an odd number of members; members abstaining or missing votes in the House are more common in the House than the EC.
Yeah, but when that happens, they just vote again. The are never deadlocked from a tie.
> You could extend the same EC voting arrangement to, say, (to pick an odd number of territories) Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands as D.C. has now.
It would make sense to do this for Puerto Rico, whose population is greater than 20 states. But all the other territories are smaller than the smallest state, and that would give them outsize power.
> That would only add two, unless you also had a reapportionment act.
Absent a change to the fixed number of seats of full House members, it would subtract one; D.C. currently has zero Senators out of 100, zero members of the House included in the apportionment of the fixed 435 seats (it has a delegate, which is separate), and 3 electoral votes. Absent a change to the legislated size of the House, with D.C. statehood it would have 2 senators out of 102, 1 member of the House within the fixed 435 total seats, and 3 electoral votes. The total size of the EC would be reduced by one seat.
The House can and does have ties, even with an odd number of members; members abstaining or missing votes in the House are more common in the House than the EC.
You could extend the same EC voting arrangement to, say, (to pick an odd number of territories) Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands as D.C. has now.
Or adopt D.C. statehood, in which case then you have an odd number in the House + an even number in the Senate + zero.