One seat covers 34 square kilometres. One seat covers 1,713,379.

Alaska's at-large district covers 1,713,379 square kilometres. New York's 12th covers 34. Both elect one member of the House of Representatives, with one vote each on the floor. The ratio between them is 50,393 to one.

That number comes out of the Census Bureau's own district boundary file, measured as spherical area rather than as a projected map, so Alaska is not being inflated the way it is on a classroom Mercator. It is the real ground.

The two ends of the list

This is the arithmetic working

Article I distributes House seats by population and says nothing about area, so a district drawn around 760,000 people in Manhattan will be small and a district drawn around 760,000 people in Alaska will not. The gap is not a drafting error and no redistricting commission created it.

What it does change is the job. A member representing NY-12 can drive its length in under an hour. A member representing Nebraska's 3rd holds town halls across 79 counties, which is more counties than 44 states contain in total. Montana's 2nd district, at 275,421 square kilometres, is larger than the entire state of Colorado, which is 269,354.

There is no clean way to say which of those is the harder job, and I am not going to pretend the area figure settles it. Staff budgets are identical. Travel reimbursement is not tied to district size in any way that scales to a factor of fifty thousand. Whether that matters is an argument about representation that this number can inform and cannot resolve.

The states that stretch furthest internally

The spread inside a single state is often wider than people expect, because state lines constrain the map and population does not distribute evenly inside them.

New York is the widest in the country. Its smallest district and its largest sit in the same delegation, vote in the same chamber, and are separated by three orders of magnitude of ground.