An Ill-Conceived Proposal for Apportionment of the U.S. House of Representatives

Burt and Harris advocate the use of minimum range for the apportionment of the U.S. House of Representatives. In this note we suggest that (1) their statements on fairness are ill-considered, (2) their statements on uniqueness are misleading, and (3) the computation they suggest is unnecessarily long. Our discussion of (2) and (3) involves the presentation of an alternative computational scheme. In an appendix, we present a formal proof that the alternative computational scheme always works.