okay, I guess.

The recent discussions of an expanded West Virginia or Greater Idaho led me to a thought on how this should be handled.

First, Congress isn’t going to approve an expansion of the number of states.  Whatever balance the Senate might have would be upset by new states, so the idea of splitting California will not happen.

On the other hand, while moving parts of states around might upset the Electoral College and reduce (increase) certain states’ power, if it was across the board changes instead of isolated, it might be approved.

On the gripping hand, chaos is fun!  So lets talk about an idea I had.

 

Congress (along with the states in question) have to approve any changes to state boundaries.  If we can get all 51 entities on board, they could preemptively approve changes under the following procedure (or we pass an amendment to make this happen and only need 34 states on board).  Every 4 years, a state may offer contiguous* counties from another state a chance to leave their state and join yours.  If the population of the county(or Parish in LA) votes Yes on presidential election day, then they join their new state the next July 4th.  And with the expanded border, there are new counties to potentially invite.

Another way would be to invite more counties than that, but you can only accept the ones who vote to move and meet the contiguity rules.  Otherwise, it could take a long time for Greater Idaho to get to northern California.

Thoughts?  Any idea what the new borders would look like?  Odds of an obnoxious county hopping back and forth every 4 years?

 

*it also cannot create a discontiguity in the other state.