3. Each state gets five automatic seats in the Council -- the other 120 are divided according to population. As described in All Politics is Local, each state is divided into "ridings" of roughly equal population. Oddly, the strict insistance on "one man, one vote" in the IOW USA does not even extend to IOW Canada (it was a response to race-based unfair voting practices in the South). In IOW Quebec, ridings for the National Assembly (provincial parliament) differ in population by as much as a factor of two. It seems to be an accepted principle that MNA's from far-flung rural ridings should have fewer constituents... This table gives the same overall 80-53-17 result as Sobel's, and has about the same relative performance in each state.
(Return to That All the World Should be Counted.)