Congressional Redistricting Essay ⋆ Essays on Controversial Topics ⋆ EssayEmpire

Article I, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution calls for representation to the House of Representatives to be apportioned among the states according to the respective number of individuals residing in each state. The initial apportionment, or assigning of seats to individual states, gave 10 districts to Virginia, 8 to Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, 6 to Maryland and New York, 5 to Connecticut, North Carolina, and South Carolina, 4 to New Jersey, 3 to New Hampshire and Georgia, and 1 each to Rhode Island and Delaware. For subsequent Congresses after 1790 and then repeated every 10 years, the enumeration has relied on a census of the population. The census is an actual count, rather than a sample, of every person—citizen and noncitizen alike—residing in each of the states. As such, the danger exists of some groups of people undercounted or others overcounted.

The Constitution as originally written called for one district for roughly every 30,000 residents and a guarantee of at least one representative per state. Elections were to be held every 2 years in the districts to elect members who would then serve in the House of Representatives. Unlike the Senate, vacancies due to death or resignation must be filled by a special election, not by appointment.

Apportionment

Over time, the number of districts increased as the population grew and new states entered the Union. In 1911, Congress arbitrarily set the total number of congressional districts at 435, and states would thereafter gain or lose representation in the House based on relative population growth or decline. The House temporarily increased to 437 seats when Hawaii and Alaska entered the Union.

Once the census is complete, each state is initially assigned one representative irrespective of population. Then, since 1941, the rest of the 385 seats are distributed according to the “method of equal proportions.” According to the U.S. Census Bureau, this system ranks the states by assigning a priority value calculated by dividing the population of each state by the geometric mean of its current and next seats. The 51st district is then assigned to the state with the highest priority value, and the process is repeated until all

435 districts have been distributed. Prior to 1941, different methods were used, and states stood to gain or lose seats depending on which method Congress employed to assign districts. When the size of the House was initially capped at 435 members, the average district size was 210,000 persons. As of the 2000 census, there were about 650,000 residents per congressional district.

Redistricting

The practice of drawing district lines for political (or other) gain has been around since Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts sketched the first gerrymander around 1810. However, most modern redistricting is shaped by a trio of Supreme Court cases from the 1960s. In 1962, the court ruled in Baker v. Carr that the drawing of districts was in fact open to judicial interpretation. Two years later, in Reynolds v. Sims, the resulting “one-man one-vote” doctrine required the populations of legislative districts to be as equal as practicable. This standard was then applied to congressional districts in the 1964 case Wesberry v. Sanders. Afterward, nearly every state with more than one district was forced to redistrict to comply with the new rulings.

Redistricting plans can be either partisan or bipartisan and are implemented by state governments, redistricting commissions, or the courts. Partisan gerrymandering, which has the goal of attempting to remove as many minority party incumbents as possible, strengthens the average electoral security of some minority party incumbents while causing others to lose their seats. The idea is that greater safety for a few minority party members leads to a less efficient use of their political power overall. This procedure causes the minority party as a whole to be worse off (as measured in terms of the effective number of wasted votes), since they are “packed” into highly partisan districts, while at the same time making individual members more secure. Bipartisan plans, which generally occur under divided government, strive to make incumbents of both parties as safe as possible.

Unlike legislatures, redistricting commissions and courts are not subject to the same electoral and institutional constraints in the districting process. For example, commissioners are often not elected officials and, in some cases, are not even allowed to hold elected office for several years after the districting cycle. This in turn weakens their ties to voters and the party since they are not beholden to either group as a result of the “one-shot” nature of the redistricting process. However, in other instances, commissions are made up of members of the state legislatures and representatives from the governor’s office. When commissions are independent from the legislature, the districts they draw can differ from those drawn when the commission is made up of elected officials.

While one cannot expect judges or commissioners to always behave in a nonpartisan fashion, their means of selection makes it less likely that they will be susceptible to influence from the political parties compared to the behavior of elected representatives. In addition to electoral factors, commissions are also subject to a variety of institutional constraints in terms of the redistricting process. For instance, commission-drawn plans and their underlying goals may vary for states that employ these mechanisms in redrawing district lines. Among states employing commissions for the purpose of redistricting, variations persist in terms of tie-breaking rules, overriding objectives, and deadlines for submitting completed plans. At other times, commissions may get involved in the districting process only when the legislature and the governor cannot agree on a plan by the specified deadline. If good government groups get their way, we might expect to see more districts drawn by commissions rather than legislatures in the future.

Bibliography:

Butler, David and Bruce Cain. 1992. Congressional Redistricting: Comparative and Theoretical Perspectives. New York: Macmillan.
Cox, Gary W. and Jonathan N. Katz. 2002. Elbridge Gerry’s Salamander: The Electoral Consequences of the Reapportionment Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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