Reapportionment and Reapportionment and GerrymanderingGerrymandering

“Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States…within every subsequent term of ten years…”

Article I, Section 2, Clause 3

Every ten years, we conduct a census to count the citizens. This is done to determine how many Congressmen each State should have in the House of Representatives.

As the population grew, new Congressional districts were added to keep up with the growth.

Then, in 1929, Congress set the limit of the number of Representatives at 435. Now, every 10 years, more constituents are added to each of the 435 Congressional districts.

The individual States redraw their Congressional districts every 10 years for two reasons:1) based on the number of Representatives they have

2) the new locations of their population. This is called redistricting

This is considered a political activity because it is essentially done by political parties in the state legislatures with the majority party trying to gain as much power for itself than the other guys.

Since it is a political activity, different groups try to gain advantages by drawing districts certain ways. Parties can limit the power of the other party by

creating districts that ‘favor’ their own party. Parties can also try to help or hurt minorities to keep

their votes down or giving them a single district where they make a majority number.

As a way to keep these groups from voting, states could do one of two things:

“Packing” – Put all of the people from the targeted group into one district so they have only one Representative (and therefore not much power).

“Cracking” – Spread out the targeted group among as many districts as possible so they would have no impact on the election.

This is called gerrymandering:

def: The drawing of electoral district lines to the advantage of a specific party or group.

Rules for Reapportionment1. Each Congressional district must be

geographically continuous.

2. Each district in a State must have approximately the same number of voters.

3. States cannot gerrymander for race, but may gerrymander for political (party) gain.

“majority-minority districts” = districts where the minority racial group is the majority

Struck down by the Supreme Court in 1996

Westbury v. Sanders

1964 U.S. Supreme Court case Said that each district must have these

rules. “one person, one vote”

One district cannot have 50,000 voters while another has 500,000. The people in the 500,000 voter district don’t have an equal voice as the people do in the smaller district.

Changes in number of Congressmen based

on 2000 Census

Notice how the rest of the districts are compact and simple. Why make the 12th so odd?

Race

1990 1990 attemptattempt

1992 1992 RedoneRedone(Nice and simple)

2000 2000 redistrictingredistricting

All of the green is one district.

The 11th (blue) is one district.

6th Dist. (used to be us)

Again, all of the pink is one district… does this look “continuous”?

This was drawn by Democratically controlled GA House and Senate trying to limit the GOP

2006 2006 RedoneRedone(Nice and simple again!)

1992 1992 RedoneRedone(Nice and simple)

Gerrymandering in GA recently Georgia’s State House and Senate districts were

ruled unconstitutional by a federal court a few years ago and ordered to be redrawn. “One-person, one-vote” was a reason Some districts had multiple representatives…?

The General Assembly didn’t act fast enough, so a federally appointed group redid them. Some had new representatives and voting places assigned last summer.

We have to have any changes pre-cleared by the U.S. Department of Justice because of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.