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PERSON, ONE VOTE APPORTIONMENT DEFINED The word "apportionment" describes how votes are distributed among several legislative districts with the same jurisdiction. Those legislative districts elect representatives who together constitute a legislative body. The United States House of Representatives is probably the best known example of such a body. Other examples are Houses of Representatives in the various states, although some are called by different names. State Senates where the members are elected from geographical districts are similar examples. County Councils, various state agencies which are composed of representation elected from districts, and Boards of Aldermen or similar city councils. (The United States Senate is an exception to the apportionment laws because its membership is defined by the United States Constitutions as "two Senators from each State. Some United States Senators represent as few as roughly 400,000 in each state, and others in large population states represent several million people.) The Constitutional issue was one of equality of representation for United States voters. Illegal apportionment of legislative districts occurs when one or both of two facts happen: 1. The total number of voters in one jurisdiction, such as those who vote for members of the House of Representatives in Washington must be evenly divided among those elected members. That means, as a practical matter, that each member must represent essentially the same number of constituents. That sounds easy until it is applied to all the districts in the United States. Logically if there are a certain number of constituents in the country, we simply divide that number by the number of Members in the Congress and draw lines around representative districts with an equal number of people inside the lines. The law requires that each state have at least one Member of Congress. States with small populations sometimes have substantially smaller or larger numbers of constituents than the number which results from divided the total national number of constituents by the total number of Members. As a practical mathematical result, those constituents in states with the smaller number have more representation than others from other jurisdictions. In reverse, those states with more constituents than the number to be allotted to a Member are under-represented. These apportionment issues exist in the current representation scheme based on the 2000 decennial national census. Substantial variations in the number of constituents per Member are also caused because all of the representative districts must be, by law, within the state where the representation occurs. When there are several districts in one state, and the districts are defined around historic county or other local districts, the numbers of constituents per Member can get out of whack and be illegally uneven. 2. The second problem is when the legislative body, court, or other agency with the responsibility to draw the lines of a legislative district "gerrymander" the borders, i.e., they move the borders around to impact the outcome of the election of the candidates from the district. In this situation, the law requires that the borders of a district be "contiguous" - which boils down to the idea that a drawers have to come as close to a circle as they can in getting an even number of constituents inside the borders. Since the people elected from the districts often define the lines for their own election, terrible political incentives to gerrymander the district lines are very great. Updated Friday, May 25, 2007 09:46 PM
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PRESIDENTIAL-APPOINTMENTS.ORG PAGES
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