	No State Loses a Seat In 1871-72 the size of the House was increased by 21% in order to retain more power in the northern states. If the House had not been significantly enlarged then the southern states would have taken many more seats from the northern due to the 14th Amendment. The practice of enlarging the House to mitigate the effects of apportionment population shifts was followed thereafter. In the Reapportionment Act following the 1880 census an increase in the number of seats saved all but 2 seat losses. In reapportionment acts following the censuses of 1890, 1900, and 1910 no state lost a seat. The House was enlarged just enough to prevent such loses. The chart at left illustrates what would have happened if reapportionment had been carried forth in that same manner until now. Please note the reasonable stability of electoral "district size" around two hundred thousand.
	That method of deciding the size of the House ended in 1921 when the incoming Republican party, fearing that reapportionment would lose their majority in the Congress, simply refused to pass a reapportionment bill. Then in 1929 the Republicans created The Reapportionment Act of 1929 which did not reapportion anything but which did repealed all statutes concerning single member districts, in effect rescuing the incumbent Congress. The act also limited the House to 435 members. As you can see in the chart at left, this has created electoral districts that are much larger than they otherwise would have been. There has always been adequate basis for condemning such large electoral districts as being much less representative of the people and much more representative of the power elite.