The United States Redrawn as Fifty States with Equal Population
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2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
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HN comment orderEven if you TRY to make votes equally powerful by adjusting state boundaries to equalize population, you still ignore the fact that the electoral college is like a MASSIVE round-off error, and thus entirely fail to succeed in your goal and in understanding the essence of the problem, in general. To massively simplify things: consider that there are only 3 states. State A is 60/40, state B is 45/55, and state C is 50/50. All 3 have identical populations. Now…
I feel like the bigger problem than the electoral college is the senate. I think it’s pretty crazy California and Texas have the same number of senate votes as Rhode Island. It made sense at the time and we do have a house to nominally balance that out. But nowadays it just makes some people’s votes count for a lot more than others.
To be honest, I'm actually most interested in the origins of all of the proposed state names. Some are obvious, others less so.
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 2
- Total points
- 295
- Total comments
- 320
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013-02-14 | Fifty states with equal population | lemma | 11 | 3 |
| 2013-02-14 | The United States Redrawn as Fifty States with Equal PopulationFirst breakout · Best thread | wdavidturner | 219 | 201 |
| 2019-12-01 | US 50 states redrawn as equal population (2012)Latest 20+ point return | cryptozeus | 60 | 116 |
| 2021-02-27 | The United States Redrawn as 50 States with Equal Population [2012] | systemvoltage | 5 | 0 |