How would you split this pizza?

Ten ways.

Not too high, right?

What about 100?

Better yet.

How would you split this up into 435 equal slices, and then survey proportionately to 50 different groups of people?

Now that's a challenge.

Every ten years, the United States is faced with a similar but far less tasty dilemma as it reworks the makeu of our House of Representatives.

I think we're going to need a bigger pizza.

In Congress, the Senate is mean to give the states an equal say, with each state electing two senators to represent the people.

The House of Representatives is meant to represen the people based on population.

The more people that live in a state, the more of the house is 435 voting members.

That state claims every ten year after the census is conducted.

The process of apportionmen reworks the makeup of the House to reflect where the people live across our country.

And some states may pick up or lose seats depending on how their population changed.

But how does apportionment actually work?

Better grab a calculator.

Let's start from scratch.

The first step is to ensure each state is given at least one voting member in the House.

So that takes care of 50 seats.

From there we use what's called the method of equal proportions to divvy up the rest of the 385 seats.

This formula uses a state's population and the number of seats it could receive to assign what are called priority values for each potential seat.

Once these priority value are calculated for each state, the values are then ranked from highest to lowest to determine the order in which the remaining seats are distributed.

The 51st available seat goes to the state with the highest priority value.

The next available seat goes to the next highest value, and so on.

Until we filled all 435 seats.

The higher your state's population is, the higher its calculated priority values will be.

This is why our more heavily populated states like California, Texas, and Florida have many more representative than our lower populated states, which may not get any extra seats beyond their one guaranteed spot.

It's important to note that 435 is simply the numbe of voting members of the House.

Six nonvoting seats are reserved for Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and for other U.S. territorie American Samoa, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands.

These members do not get to vote on the House floor, but they can introduce legislation for consideration in the House and vote in the committees.

Their members have.

It may be a lot of math but this task of reapportionment helps ensure that our makeu of the House of Representatives reflects the makeup of our United States population.

Now we're talking.