Reapportionment 201

From the Clarion Ledger this past weekend -

Reapportionment 201: Variances in population, size of new congressional districts can be substantial

Every decade, following the census, Congress should be reapportioned to reflect population shifts. This is done by a consideration of the same single-member district concepts discussed in "Reapportionment and Redistricting 101" in the newspaper's May 24 edition. But in the truest sense, congressional reapportionment is quite different.

Congressional reapportionment is based on certain "counting" objectives. For example, the congressional reapportionment requires that the entire population be counted. This includes American citizens, legal aliens, illegal aliens, and individuals who are employed by the Department of Defense and are currently residing out of the country.

In search of the one man, one vote quest, the system ignores the following issues:


Are the citizens of voting age?


Are the citizens registered voters?


Why are legal and illegal aliens considered in the count, if they are not covered by the "one man, one vote" allegory?


Does the allocation of Department of Defense employees who are stationed out of the country skew the population toward jurisdictions with an ample supply of defense installations located within their borders?


Who establishes and endorses the directives given to the Department of Commerce and the U.S. Bureau of Census?

These questions are answered in part by an examination of census objectives. Additionally, from the numbers gleaned from the decennial census, a different standard is applied for congressional reapportionment. In Mississippi, we have 1,873,740 registered voters out of 2,910,540 residents, 26.1 percent of whom are under the age of 18, and thus unable, based on age, to be able to vote.

The remainder of the unregistered voters are old enough to vote but have not, for various reasons, registered to vote in the state. This would include aliens but also individuals who are simply not engaged in the voting process.

The current method of apportioning seats in Congress was adopted in 1941 and uses a mathematical formula to assign a priority value to each House seat. Previous formulas which had been adopted simply divided the national or state populations by the number of congressional seats, so a state could have fewer seats than its population warranted.

The Constitution requires that "representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state." This obligation has been enhanced by case law after 1962.

For example, in the 1964 case of Westberry v. Sanders, the Supreme Court held that the reapportionment resulting after each decennial census should be "as nearly equal as practicable" and thereafter, in Kirkpatrick v. Priesler, rejected an argument that small variations in population between congressional districts were de minimis (so minor as to be negligible), noting that "nothing is de minimis" and any variances must be determined to be unavoidable or justified as supporting an acknowledged and valid governmental policy.

In 1983, the Supreme Court reaffirmed its position in Kilpatrick, in the decision of Karcher v. Daggett, by noting that there is no level of population inequality among congressional districts that is too small, so long as the plan's challengers can show that the inequality could have been avoided.


Read more here...