WI: Representation based off of voting population

Question what if representation rather than being based off raw population was instead based on the voting population of a state and more specifically on the number of people who actually voted in said states election. To provide some context:

In the United States representation within the house of representatives has always technically been based off the raw general population of a specific area for the most part determined via census. X number of people = y number of representatives within the house. Exceptions for small states like Wyoming which get atleast one representative despite their small populations. Currently as of now due to the fixed number of representatives(435) this means for every roughly ~750,000 you get atleast 1 representative; as mentioned before exceptions noted for states who have below that number of people who get 1 representative.

This has created a bit of conflict in the past with one of the earliest the 3/5th compromise. This stemmed from the desire of slaves states wishing to expand their power by having the slaves counted for population/representation despite the fact said slaves were from a legal standpoint the equivalent of tools or farm animals rather than actual people. On the other end other states which had less slaves and/or desired to abolish the practice wished that slaves would be subject to property taxes like the aforementioned tools or farm animals. The compromised was made to satisfy both sides. Other more recent conflicts relate toward things like the Wyoming rule and so on so on.

What I wish to ask about is similar but a little different from many of the normal conflicts related toward representation specifically it is about the nature of representation in the first place and on who should and possibly should not count for representation within the house.

So I will reiterate my previous introduction, what if representation within the house was in direct correlation to the voting population and maybe even determined based off voter turnout? How could such a thing be bought about and what would its effects be? Would it be an overall net positive or would it cause more negatives?

In my eyes the earliest I can see something like this coming about would be sometime in the mid 19th century around the time of reconstruction and when Jim crow was in it's birth bed. The reasoning behind it would be a rather admirable one. Within many of said jim crow states launched a "valiant" to do everything in their power to disenfranchise those who were viewed as undesirables, most notably recently freed blacks but also poor whites to some degree. They were smart and didn't technically outright ban said persons from voting but instead used various methods(intimidation, poll taxes, etc) to discourage them from doing so resulting in incredibly low voter turnouts. From what I remember states like Louisiana had voter turnouts as low as or below 10% but despite that fact they still received representation in accordance with their entire population which allowed groups like the Dixiecrat to infest the house which helped aid in the death of reconstruction. The results are rather well known, the the slow motion nightmare of "the nadir of race relations" and all the tragedy that came with it. Under the proposed system though, probably bought about via amendment, could be a potential means to combat said jim crow and though yes groups like the redeemers would still be capable and willing to disenfranchise their fellow man at least they would be punished for it on the national level. Best of all it doesn't even require federal action technically which is good considering said action was becoming tired off and unpopular with the general public.

Conversely though it is a double edged sword. Would it combat jim crow in the short term? yes. But on the otherhand it does in the long term shoot the makers of this system in the foot. As time goes on immigrants increased dramatically in some states which under this system wouldn't count for representation which I can't see not earning their ire. This would be especially contentious in the modern day for obvious reasons.

But I digress I think I will stop talking for now. What do you think the results of this system would be and how could it be implemented in the first place? Would it be good or bad or maybe a mixed bag? Discuss. I wish to hear your thoughts on the matter.
 
I for one am glad that when you think of voting systems you think of situations such as Jim Crow and wonder how to prevent such terror from being rewarded. It has a strong influence on ideas I have.

For some time now I have been advocating a form of Proportional Representation whereby the benefits and options of District Voting, and voter preference for particular individual candidates, can be combined with the benefits of nation-wide (or state wide, whatever level the legislature in question serves) aggregation of all votes for maximum proportionality. I have a lot of trouble describing it simply to be fair, and as far as I know it is not a system that fits into any well-defined version of PR that has been implemented or even proposed. I would guess someone out there has suggested it but I've never heard of anyone but me saying this.

So the idea is, you have a legislature of a certain size, say 500 seats. You divide by two to get the number of districts the nation is apportioned into. They should of course be districts of equal population but I think the proportional element minimizes the harm done by badly done apportionment.

So now we have 250 districts but 500 seats in the legislature. Temporarily adopting traditional language of parties for clarity from familiarity, we have parties nominate one each candidate in the district, and they also name an alternate.

The ballot then lists the candidates by name and by party. A person can vote for one. Then, across the nation, each vote for a candidate is also counted as a vote for their party, and the national total of votes for each party determines the proportional share each party gets. (I recommend using Hamilton's Method of Greatest Remainders but it only makes a small difference which established system of determining proportional shares. Note--from prior discussions I have shown cases where the apparently simplest method of looking at raw fractional numbers of seats a party should get and simply rounding to whole numbers will not work--it sometimes results in a different number of seats being awarded than there are in the legislature!)

Having done that, in the simplest form now each party ranks all their candidates who ran in order of number of votes they got, and however many seats they are allocated, the top candidates on the list take them in order until they run out of seats.

That's it in simplest form. It isn't that hard to explain really, except that certain complications are important to consider.

Your concern is one of them. What happens if we have a region of the nation, or in the worst case the whole nation, discouraging or even violently preventing certain categories of citizens from voting?

Well, if it is the whole nation then it boils down to a general problem of civil rights and the need for the discriminated against groups to win their stolen legitimacy back, by all the complicated politics outside the formal political system they are barred from that we know from history of various places.

But say, as your examples allude to, that there is a regional aspect to this--that in some parts of the nation the excluded groups have at least partial access, and are only somewhat discouraged, while in others a draconian repression exists and members of the out group attempt to participate in politics at the dire risk of their lives and are unlikely to be allowed to effectively vote--and if they somehow do, by the others of their category being excluded the are robbed of power?

Well, compare first of all to OTL US systems which favor single representative districts with first-past-the-post AkA Winner Take All. In some places there are attempts to at least make sure the winner has an actual majority, accomplished via run-offs whenever a third party candidate denies the plurality holder a majority. But usually we just go with the plurality holder being considered the winner, full stop. Certainly if there is to be only one candidate chosen by a voter, there is no argument for any other than the plurality holder to take priority! A run-off emphasizes the principle that a true majority should govern which is a weak form of valuing consensus. But as a practical matter runoffs tend to have low turnout so very perverse outcomes can result even if there is no voter repression going on.

So anyway, in the case of the Jim Crow South, it was normal for African Americans to be excluded wholesale. In a few states, whites were actually the minority, but even so an effectively all-white election in say a US Congressional district, returning a clear majority winner most of the time (in the South of those days of course, just about always a Democrat by huge majorities of the white vote, black vote not even allowed to happen--by subterfuge since a Reconstruction era amendment specifically forbade discrimination by race in qualification for voting). This winner would then be deemed to represent all the people in their district, never mind that a substantial number, sometimes a solid majority of the population, was prevented from having any influence on the outcome! This I believe is what you are talking about. Not only was there no penalty for this, the dominant party was actively rewarded; influencing and catering to the interests of a smaller group than the whole population of the district gained the national party clout as though they had done the work of balancing the interests of all the people. Thus not only did Southern Democrats stand foursquare for white-only elections, Northern ones who questioned it would undermine the power base of their own faction in Congress. Some did anyway, but by and large the political balance seemed dead against anyone doing anything about it, and as I am sure you and others realize the ramifications went even beyond the status and welfare of African Americans to affect a great many other policies as the generally conservative white establishment of the South wielded disproportional power.

To argue that even today, for various reasons including racist exclusion but also for other reasons, the district system in general tends to give a distorted image of national interest at best, and is subject to many easy manipulations to shift the balance systematically (such as misapportionment and gerrymandering) is to risk a nasty political argument, but I think you would agree that we have hardly achieved perfection today despite having successfully abolished most of the legally enforced legacy of Jim Crow.

Now look at what would have happened if Congress had been chosen by national proportional representation in this time! In the simplest national PR system where there are no districts at all and parties present voters with lists of those they would seat if people would give them the mandate, it would still be possible and probably the case that the same racist interests would prevent the same southern African American voters from voting as OTL; no system of juggling votes around would be able to magically accomplish representation of people who are prevented from voting at all. But, there would be no multiplier reward those ruthless enough with the claim to represent people they do not allow to vote, for or against them. Instead, if we have other parts of the nation where turnout is high, because every voter who does manage to get to the polls counts equally, the regions that do not suppress votes will tend to be more strongly represented in the House. If the southern white supremacists did not suppress black voters but allowed them to be counted, probably those voters would not vote for them and so they would not benefit, in fact the supremacists would suffer because the ranks of their opposition would grow. Since a fixed number of seats are being distributed and ending repression would increase the total number of voters, the supremacists with a fixed, given number of votes would in fact lose seats. But their region, their states, would have more total representatives in the House, while the other regions would lose seats in the same way the supremacists do.

In this respect, the system I have outlined above is a national proportional voting system, and under it, a region that suppresses a fraction of its voters is a region that undermines the number of representatives their region will send to the House, or whatever level of legislature we are talking about.

Now you might wonder why I have bothered to propose a system based on districts at all. The major reasons for doing that do not bear on the topic at hand so I will not elaborate here though I'd be glad to explain if the subject has interest. What addresses your concern here is the basic fact that a proportional system aggregated at the national level automatically exerts a penalty on a faction that seeks to repress votes by weakening the national standing of their region in the legislature. If representation is based on votes, then suppressing votes in a region weakens the region. It empowers other regions with other norms to seek majorities for legislation and committees of investigation to air these matters out. Since the people being repressed are probably going to want to support rival parties to those favoring the repression, the rival parties have a vested interest in rooting out the repression, and the automatic weakening of the region limits the degree to which a repressive regime can leverage its control of their region into influence on the national scale.

Because I am aware that the district aspect of my system could be used to limit the effects of this automatic favoring of regions that allow freest voting, I have elaborated it with some complications that tend to make it harder for me to explain it. One of these would be to set up mechanisms whereby voters can vote for candidates outside their district; this is something I thought of largely with the history of Jim Crow restrictions in mind. It is not entirely possible for a regional conflict of this kind to be resolved by policing every aspect of the daily lives of the repressive region, to infallibly detect every attempt at terror or intimidation or even to punish gross instances of it after the fact. But it may be possible to enforce fair elections, to send in impartial election monitors and back them with armed and legal force to guarantee that if the repressed people will dare to show up at the polls and cast a secret vote, they will not be prevented from doing that that day. If only a few dare, they may fear retaliation later but if all can be persuaded to go, the task of punishing every one of them is overwhelming, meanwhile they effectively make their voice heard at last. By being allowed to vote, they can empower representatives in Congress owing their office to their votes to take an interest in seeing to it that there are not retaliations and that the region accept the fact that they will be voting in the future, and with their individual votes not being capable of being tied to which person cast them, they can hope no one can single them out for a strange vote.

But it would probably be possible for the repressive elements to impede the political process anyway before and after the election. It might be too dangerous at first for an individual living in the district to stand for a party that is going to fight to end the repression. But if there is a way for people to cast their vote for a candidate known to them running in some other district, in a place where it is safe for them to openly stand for this platform without fearing violent preemption by murderous means or other grave threats, then the repressed locals at least have the option of picking someone who does stand for them, even if these people are from a district far away, in another state or on the other side of the nation. This kind of extreme situation is exactly why I figure that the system I propose should allow for people to vote for any candidate, anywhere in the nation. By doing that they not only register a vote for a particular party, they also identify an individual candidate they trust in particular to follow through and speak for them.

Harder to explain that that is the manner in which I would formally divorce the groups people vote for from political parties, and allow alternate means of putting serious candidates before the voters without party mechanisms. I would not abolish parties but by formally making the alternate method of nomination the standard one, parties would become as it were private clubs or lobbies that seek to be identified with strong groups of candidates, rather than having strong control over who those candidates are--or rather, a party can be as strong or as weak as its supporters deem fit, for they would become voluntary organizations. I won't elaborate here but again when proposing such alternate methods I do bear in mind the fact that people can be retaliated against for holding known political stands and seek methods that allow even members of repressed groups who know they are being watched to still effectively engage as much as possible while keeping their anonymity.

I want to close by pointing out that although I think there are reasons districts should exist, in this system because of the proportional aspect of it, malapportionment and gerrymandering would be nearly completely ineffective. In a simple district system, if one district has twice the population of another, we judge that the former has been discriminated against, its residents robbed of their due share of influence and specially small population districts have an unduly large share of power out of proportion to their population. But if the votes of people of all districts are combined by simply adding them all up, it does not matter whether one votes in an underpopulated or overpopulated one; either way one voter counts the same toward the total. Whereas if we choose the individuals who take the seats a party (or association, or faction, whatever we call it formally) by how many total votes they get, indeed the sizes do matter, for now it is the underpopulated districts who are at a disadvantage because the same percentage of votes count as more total votes in the larger district. It may be that the dynamic is reversed here and that corrupt politicians will seek to create large districts to perpetuate their hold on the seats. But the voters of small districts, if they choose to, can jump ship and form a new party, perhaps one similar to their old one but devoted to the smaller district's interests, or one organized around nothing but these regional interests. It behooves the elected office holders to even up the size of their districts. Again with gerrymandering, this is games that either dilute discriminated against minorities by dispersing them into numerous majority "safe" districts, or concentrating them into a single district to minimize their impact when they have a larger base than the single vote they are sacrificially permitted to wield that preempts them from the two or more they really ought to have. But with a proportional system, again it does not matter where a voter votes from, the vote is counted anyway. Again with representatives of groups the dominant and repressing society sought to to prevent or minimize are present in proportional numbers in the legislature, and so Congress may more reasonably police itself.
 
Question what if representation rather than being based off raw population was instead based on the voting population of a state and more specifically on the number of people who actually voted in said states election.

Wouldn't this simply encourage shameless ballot stuffing in the 19th century?
 
Wouldn't this simply encourage shameless ballot stuffing in the 19th century?

Potential yes but last I checked you need physical people in order to register in a time when voting was public so that kinda limits that more or less. Hopefully. That is a fair issue though, but for some reason I suspect the census could deter it. Also I imagine if something like this got implemented it would come in a package that might include atleast partial federal regulation of elections and most notably voting registration possibly.
 
Potential yes but last I checked you need physical people in order to register in a time when voting was public so that kinda limits that more or less. Hopefully. That is a fair issue though, but for some reason I suspect the census could deter it. Also I imagine if something like this got implemented it would come in a package that might include atleast partial federal regulation of elections and most notably voting registration possibly.
Then why not simply have the Republican Party make sure southern racists can't disenfranchise black people, if it has the power to actively oversee voting registration in the states?

Plus, say a state certifies a vote count of 10 million, 3 million of whom are poor whites who didn't vote, but would vote Democratic if forced to, and another 3 million African-Americans who weren't allowed to actually vote. What should those AAs do? Walk into a courthouse in the state capitol and claim that the governor and the state legislature maliciously included them in the vote count?
 
Then why not simply have the Republican Party make sure southern racists can't disenfranchise black people, if it has the power to actively oversee voting registration in the states?

Plus, say a state certifies a vote count of 10 million, 3 million of whom are poor whites who didn't vote, but would vote Democratic if forced to, and another 3 million African-Americans who weren't allowed to actually vote. What should those AAs do? Walk into a courthouse in the state capitol and claim that the governor and the state legislature maliciously included them in the vote count?

You may have a point. Though I would argue federal inspection of voting is a lot different from full scale Reconstruction for the most part. One just simply requires checking that ballots are being performed properly while the other... requires a bit more effort. In the case of the second if the people didn't even physically vote I doubt they could fake it that easily. Another thing to keep in mind is secret ballots which in the case of those poor whites they can't guarantee they would actually vote as they were told. How are they supposed to tell who snubbed and who fell in line at that point. On the otherhand it brings us back to the issue of ballot stuffing which you correctly mentioned would probably become an issue. Considering how corrupt the states in question were in are world I wouldn't doubt they would attempt it.

Valiant effort to try to reduce the power of Jim crow, albeit probably not enough eh? The hope was not necessarily to bring about changes on the local level, I'm too pessimistic for such things, only that it could bring about some good on the national level by not allowing them to benefit in that realm and hold the rest of the nation back. A sort of "waddle in your own filth, but don't drag us in with you" sort of methodology if you.
 
This makes the three-fifths compromise impossible. Any ideas on what the South gets in return at the Constitutional Convention.

I'm assuming it would have to be done then, as afterwards the South would block any such Amendment, and even states outside the South would object to being, in effect, forced to adopt the widest possible franchise. It's significant that Section 2 of the 14th Amendment was never enforced, even when Jim Crow was at its most blatant.
 
This makes the three-fifths compromise impossible. Any ideas on what the South gets in return at the Constitutional Convention.

I'm assuming it would have to be done then, as afterwards the South would block any such Amendment, and even states outside the South would object to being, in effect, forced to adopt the widest possible franchise. It's significant that Section 2 of the 14th Amendment was never enforced, even when Jim Crow was at its most blatant.

To be fair I did mention that the only time I could see this occurring would be post civil war maybe in the dying gasps of reconstruction as a sort of last ditch effort by radical republicans. The only time such extreme measures could be taken would be during extreme times and well that seems to be the only time, atleast in my eyes. Similar to how in some peoples view a single payer system would only have been adopted sometime during the depression as a package deal with the rest of the new deal.
 
To be fair I did mention that the only time I could see this occurring would be post civil war maybe in the dying gasps of reconstruction as a sort of last ditch effort by radical republicans. The only time such extreme measures could be taken would be during extreme times and well that seems to be the only time, atleast in my eyes. Similar to how in some peoples view a single payer system would only have been adopted sometime during the depression as a package deal with the rest of the new deal.

Trouble is that in the dying gasps of Reconstruction the Republicans no longer had two-thirds majorities in either chamber - indeed no majority at all in the House. So it would need to be before 1870.
 
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Your biggest problem would be getting something like this to pass. You are going to have to give one heck of a concession to the slave-states before or after the the constitution was drafted. Things like the s compromise and the Mason-Dixon line were not only about slavery directly, about giving their side more representatives and thus more influence in the government, they won't give it up without a fight. Not to mention, at first, the states were in charge of who could vote even in federal elections in order for something like this to work properly that is something you are going to have to take away from the states, and they won't be happy about it either.

As far as after effects, whatever concession that was made would probably be large enough to have its own butterflies, but ignoring that you have potential to start seeing differences during the westward expansion. And this depends on how balanced the slave-states feel congress is, if they feel it is balanced then we would see something similar to OTL. However, if they don't which I suspect they wouldn't we could see a whole host of difference stemming from not letting new states into the union, to more western slave-states at its worst. I don't think this could remove the Civil War, but it would change it.

Interestingly in the timeline I'm writing a group tries to do this, and it doesn't end well at all... like war not end well (granted the POD is 20 some-odd years earlier so it is not a direct comparison).
 
I replied about supplying a proportional representation system, and then outlined some aspects of one that might be workable in a 19th century context, because it seems your own proposal is even less workable. Quite aside from the strategic and tactical difficulties involved in getting a half-slave state Union to agree to link the representation level to election outcomes, we have the fact that setting the number of representatives each state gets by the outcomes of elections means imposing a limit on representation in the future based on behavior in the past. Say another state in the Union, New York for instance, restricts the vote in the election of 1826 massively for reasons having nothing to do with slavery--say half the electorate is blocked and half as many people vote as did in 1824. This means that the manipulators who manage to suppress the vote in '26 win seats based on the more open and honest vote of '24. Then in outrage the people of New York rally in 1827 and by 1828 the rascals who suppressed the vote in '26 are gone, the lot of them impeached or recalled or otherwise disgraced; an election more open and honest than ever before in New York state happens...but the good guys are restricted in number because the state was penalized for their bad behavior in '26 by halving the representation.

It was very unclear on what time scale your proposal would work--OTL we only redistrict and reapportion Congress in light of the Census every decade. Instead of a Census, we could just use the turnout results themselves, but would you have reapportionment and redistricting happen every two years with each election, in response to the last one? Anyway no matter how you do it, it is responsive to events in the past and may have perverse effects on the present--rewarding bad behavior in the short term, punishing an effective remedy to bad behavior in the long run.

Whereas the distribution that happens automatically with proportional representation is responsive to the same election in which the problem occurs.

So I fell that it is kind of strange everyone is completely ignoring the suggestion!
 
"Voting population"?

Each state was free to establish its own rules for suffrage. Children, women, and non-whites were excluded, but some states had property qualifications as well - and in some cases, the property qualification stood alone, so that property-owning women and non-whites, and even non-white women, might vote. So does the apportionment consider only those with suffrage?

The assumption of the Framers and everyone else in that era was that men, as heads of households, acted for the entire household, including women and children, and therefore all members of the household were represented by the person elected by the head's vote. I don't think one can walk back that principle.
 
John Adams did say something about proportional representation being the best form of democracy, so some of my more radical modern notions were present in some form in those days. The key stumbling block is the separation of Congressional votes state by state which would pose an ideological barrier to the aggregation of blocs nationwide being selected as the primary result of a national vote. Against this, Congress was from the beginning meant to represent all the citizens proportionally, each district ideally having the same population; the fact that the smallest states would average below the national standard District size was not viewed as a good thing in itself--the ability of small states to avoid being overwhelmed by large states was offset by the Senate having equal representation for each state, and this also raised the power of the small states in the Electoral College, so small states insisting on the higher power they had in electing their handful of Representatives would be triple dipping on their part. We have it because it has to work that way if every state is guaranteed one vote.

Also, in practice the whole "small state versus large" dynamic has weakly if at all been demonstrated in real national politics. In reality, a small state is as likely to align with one end of the functional political spectrum as the other; you get liberal small states and conservative ones, pro-and-anti-slavery, free silver versus gold bug or whatever spectrum animates the political scene that day. At the time of framing any argument that saps any advantage the small states enjoyed might be fought vigorously and it still comes up nowadays but I do think that pragmatic politics in the light of experience with the matured political system can brush it aside, obtaining enough support in enough small states to prevail.

The really big barrier to introducing true proportional representation is that the dominant two parties will each tend to see it as a threat to their comfortable hegemony and resist it for that reason. What is needed is a moment of general discontent with both dominant parties (like today for instance) when one might hope to get majorities normally loyal to one or the other to agree that being able to express their exact preferences and elect representatives closely hewing to their own individual priorities, and that the massive wasting of effective votes under a first past the post system is bad for everyone, and the auxiliary advantages (such as nullifying Gerrymandering and the effects of misapportioned district sizes) are persuasive as well.

I freely agree that it would probably be Utopian for PR to be considered any time before say 1840, and weakly then, but in a time of turmoil such as the post Civil War period it might get a hearing. Let's say we have a Civil War period where there is no single Republican Party but rather a coalition of say two or three "radical" parties that taken together form a strong majority and agreed on the issues of keeping the Union and abolishing slavery, for moderately different reasons, and agreed that a Democratic comeback would be bad, but could not agree on merging into one party with one platform post-war, though at least some of them did agree to the values of Reconstruction. Throw in that perhaps in this ATL, slave uprisings, notably in black-majority regions like South Carolina and Louisiana and Mississippi were crucial to Union victory, and local freedman militias and regional governmental coalitions, with some of them at least successfully leveraging divisions among white voters to gain some white allies, are also seen as crucial for checking Democratic resurgence, and offer the nation as a whole proportional representation in both the House and in state legislatures as a sovereign remedy.

If PR in a nationally aggregated form is introduced by say 1872 for the House, then it is too late to penalize the slave states for having slaves, which is Utopian anyway unless we can envision abolition prevailing long before 1860 by peaceful means (or moderated violence perhaps). But looking back on the dominance of the Slavocracy over the free state majority could be one of many things helping confirm opinion around getting and keeping PR. In the modified form I mentioned, further modified for greater conformity with the Constitutional philosophy of the pre-reform USA (requiring for instance every district return at least one rep, to guarantee every state representation in every Congress) PR would suffer some imperfections, but on the whole it would still automatically penalize every state or region that sought to minimize democratic participation, and reward maximum democracy. This might have some reactionary effects--for instance while advocates for trimming the voter roles below the level of universal adult male suffrage might well be shouted down, it would be more the business of other states whether some of them enfranchise women. OTL there was nothing but custom stopping a state from giving women the vote, and when Wyoming did so there was no Constitutional grounds to forbid it. Here too there would be no constitutional grounds, but by doubling the size of their legally enfranchised electorate at a stroke, Wyoming would here be doubling the total number of Representatives their population might in principle elect. In practice another effect of PR is to encourage small parties to form, which I think is part of what is very good about it--large parties must pay close attention to gratifying the priorities of all their constituents, not regard any of them as "captive" with "nowhere else to go," for disgruntled voters can always form a new party and go there, and expect it to send some reps to Congress. Others see this a problem in general--here it would tend to dilute the effect of Wyoming's women suddenly weighing in, and besides Wyoming as a new state was of course a small one, its total population amounting to only enough elect just a couple of reps if concentrated. But of course objectors to women's suffrage would see the danger immediately, what if New York were to enact it next--that state would add a whole lot of new women voters who would have a large effect on the composition of the house, might indeed be expected to send not one or two but dozens of actual women Representatives to the House! Yikes! They'd therefore fight and if the reactionaries win, all the states are going to be forbidden to give women the vote, or anyway have them excluded from Federal elections. (Trying to do that would undermine the rising new principle of secret balloting of course!) However, the flip side is that if the pro-suffrage side wins the national argument, then long before there is an Amendment to guarantee women's suffrage in all states, the states that do enact it will see a tendency for their overall representation in Congress to rise, while those of male-suffrage only will suffer in proportion. So the incentive of reluctant states, or more properly states with leadership reluctant to allow female suffrage, would be to cave into it anyway and get back into the game on an equal footing.

Again it is important to remember--in the 1786 Constitution, the Senate represents the states, the House is supposed to represent the People, and indeed the People of the USA as a whole, not so much the people of each state separately. Thus, especially after a Civil War around the issue of secession as well as the repression of a whole sector of people's basic rights, I think agreeing to PR, and the logic of "the people means all the people, not some special subcategory of the people" might prevail. Women's suffrage was on the agenda of northern progressives right after abolition of slavery after all, and was a highly favored cause in the new Western states too.
 
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