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QueueWho t1_ivoeor0 wrote

Reply to comment by Lumeria in If we flip the State House, I will have hope for this state for the first time ever. by DoctorSteve

jesus can we just wrap them into their neighbor county? Had no idea some were that small.

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Lumeria t1_ivog5c4 wrote

After Cameron, there’s Sullivan and Forest Counties that both under 10k population as well (6000 and 7000-ish respectively). If I’d had to guess, they probably roll some of their county operations in with their neighbors (or, at least, I know some counties do that).

As a fun fact, out of 67 counties, 27~ of them are smaller than the average state house seat currently.

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QueueWho t1_ivohlgq wrote

So they are over represented AND jerrymandered.

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cowboyjosh2010 t1_ivpn6it wrote

I recently did a deep dive of populations on a city/town level basis in Pennsylvania. There are 2,570 towns/cities/boroughs/whatevers in PA, and the average population size is 5,046 people per city/town. 26% of our population lives in a town/borough that is smaller than this average, but they're spread out over approximately 1,600 towns. Literally almost 2/3 of the cities/towns/boroughs in PA are so small that they're smaller than the average. No wonder so many in this state have a hard time accepting that the cities really do pack a voting punch! Most of the towns you encounter are miniscule by comparison

Here's another fun one: if you take the bottom-1,000 ranking of towns by size (so, like, start with Centralia at literally just 4 residents, and add up towns as they increase in size to the one thousandth bigger town from there), you get a population of about 1.276 million, or roughly 10% of the state, spread out over 39% of the towns. That sounds like a lot of people, until you realize that the city of Philadelphia alone has more residents than that. It's so big, that you could spot Pittsburgh's 300,000 residents to these bottom-1,000 towns by size, and they'd STILL only just barely have as many people as Philadelphia does.

Population distribution is a wild thing.

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