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The Alabama Paradox is the paradox that confronted George Washington as our founding fathers tried to devise a means for apportioning representatives to the Congress among the several states. The Constitution required that a state’s Congressional delegation be proportional to the population of the state. Any middle schooler could crunch the numbers and establish the size of each state’s delegation except that state delegations needed to be expressed in whole numbers. The controversy obtained when President Washington’s numbers people decided the way to go was first to round off the results of the initial calculation in the usual fashion: 0.5 and above were rounded up and 0.4 and below were rounded down. Second, if, at this point, the total of the several states’ delegations was not equal to the preestablished total size of The House of Representatives, apportion additional representatives one at a time to the states that had the largest fractional part prior to rounding until the desired strength of the House was met.Under this scheme, Alabama picked up an additional representative. Then it was decided to increase the size of The House by one and the algorithm was repeated. Alabama lost its additional representative to the consternation of all. As this turn of events was contrary to common sense, the title Alabama Paradox was born. President Washington vetoed the proposal and the number crunchers went back to work. |
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