The Apportionment Problem

The Apportionment Problem
Module 5 Assignment 1
Bobbi Brooks
Argosy University, Seattle

For this assignment, I needed to find out how many representatives are going to be assigned to each of the 10 states in the newly democratic nations. The first step was to add all of the state’s populations together. The total population is 532,188. The next step was to divide each individual states population by the total population to see how many seats that each state should receive for representation. After I have a percentage, I give a representative for each whole number. Once I add up the whole numbers, I have 95 out of my 100 seats spoken for. The remaining seats need to be assigned out by the highest fractional value of each state. The chart below shows these steps and the totals of each representative per state. (I am questioning if this is right. I would assume that each state should have a representative but state 5 did not get one, even with the extra states and the fractional numbers.)
|State |Population |% of Pop |Reps |Final Rep count per state |
|1 |15475 |2.90% |2 |3 |
|2 |35644 |6.66% |6 |7 |
|3 |98756 |18.55% |18 |18 |
|4 |88346 |16.60% |16 |17 |
|5 |369 |0.06% |0 |0 |
|6 |85663 |16.09% |16 |16 |
|7 |43427 |8.16% |8 |8

References: http://www.ctl.ua.edu/math103/apportionment/illALPa.htm http://www.cut-the-knot.org/Curriculum/SocialScience/AHamilton.shtml