Earlier quoted context omitted.
Each congressperson's staff gathers all of the comments they get, counts them up, and reports back to the congressperson, passing along anything they think would be useful information; if you write a clear and careful letter about an obscure topic there's a decent chance the congressperson themself will see it. Congresspeople typically have local ties in their area and caring what their constituents think is their jo…
Not an American, but I've wondered about increasing numbers myself. Certainly, giving each representative fewer citizens to represent could help. I worry about the size of the bodies, however. Too big, and they become less wieldy. Maybe I'm wrong, but I wonder about other solutions. I was thinking of, for example, 10x the number, but each grouping of 10 has a representative, and they each give proxies on votes. Maybe…
In fact I think my preferred system would be representatives get a number of votes equal to the people who voted for them, and anyone can assign anyone as their representative. Gate things like getting speaking time on representing more than x% of the vote, and maybe even have a minimum threshold if we're insisting votes are cast in person for cyber security reasons, but generally the bar for being able to represent people should be low and there shouldn't be winners and losers in elections but just people who represent different numbers of people.
