Districts are geographic areas within which eligible residents vote to elect their representatives. Everyone in the United States lives in a congressional district. You can enter your address here to find the congressional district that you live in, and who represents you. Note how your congressional district does not overlap with another congressional district.
This ensures that everyone has only one member of congress who represents them. At the bottom of the congressional district look-up tool, there are links to your state legislature's website. All state legislatures have districts, too. Most states have a similar address look-up tool or an on-line map for their state legislative districts. If you can find your state legislative district, you will note that your state legislative district does not have the same boundary as your congressional district.
No state has the same number of congressional and state legislative districts, so these different legislatures must have different district boundaries. If this was not complicated enough, you likely live in local districts, too, such as city council, county supervisor, school board, and even districts like water and conservation districts, among many others.
While it may seem difficult for you to discover all the districts that you live in, it is important to be able to determine who represents you. Have a problem with your school? Contact your school board member. Your social security check is lost?
Contact your member of congress. Most elected officials have staff to help you with these sorts of problems. They don't care which political party you are aligned with, as elected officials have learned that constituent service builds goodwill even with people of different political parties.
If you do not know who represents you, elected officials know who they represent. If you are a registered voter, around election time you may receive literature in the mail, phone calls, and visits to your door from people campaigning for office. When you vote, you will find that you can only vote for candidates to the offices in the districts you live in.
In single-member districts, like those for the U. House, voters elect only one candidate to represent their district. In multi-member districts, voters can elect two or more candidates.
Most United States governments tend to use single-member districts for legislative offices. In , the federal government passed a law requiring that congressional districts be single member. Single-member districts are not required by the U. Constitution, and they were not necessarily used in the past. Many states and localities also use single-member districts. Some states have multi-member state legislative districts and some local governments use multi-member districts for local offices.
There are different flavors of multi-member elections. If all the members are selected at-large , then voters vote separately for candidates to each office. For example, if two members are elected from a district, then voters would cast a vote for the candidates seeking the first seat and vote separately for candidates to the second seat.
Some states use bloc voting , where voters receive a number of votes equal to the number of offices to fill, all the candidates run against each other, and voters can vote for as many candidates as they have votes.
Some localities may use uncommon - to the United States - proportional representation methods to elect multiple candidates from the same district. The up-shot of multi-member districts is that a legislature may have 60 seats, but if all members are elected from two-member districts, there may be only 30 districts. Some states like Maryland and New Hampshire even allow the number of members elected from each district to vary.
Why Do Redistricting? Redistricting is the redrawing of legislative districts. By federal law, redistricting must occur following a census for two reasons. First, new districts must be drawn when a state gains or loses congressional districts as a result of the apportionment of congressional districts to the states.
Second, even if the number of districts does not change, governments must redraw districts so that the districts have equal populations. The next most common state rule is a requirement to follow political boundaries, like county, city, town, or ward lines, when drawing districts.
By state constitution or statute, 34 states require state legislative districts to show some accounting for political boundaries; 15 states impose similar constraints on congressional districts. Also, if counties or cities have to be split to comply with other redistricting requirements, most state law does not specify whether it is better to minimize the number of jurisdictions that are split, or to minimize the number of times that a given jurisdiction is split.
The former might mean splitting a few jurisdictions into many pieces; the latter might mean splitting a greater number of jurisdictions, but into fewer pieces. As an exception to the general flexibility, Ohio has a rather detailed set of constraints describing how counties and other municipalities are to be split if they have to be split at all. In California , districts are compact when they do not bypass nearby population for people farther away.
In the Voting Rights Act context, the Supreme Court seems to have construed compactness to indicate that residents have some sort of cultural cohesion in common. Scholars have proposed more than 30 measures of compactness, each of which can be applied in different ways to individual districts or to a plan as a whole.
These generally fit into three categories. In the first category, contorted boundaries are most important: a district with smoother boundaries will be more compact, and one with more squiggly boundaries will be less compact. In practice, compactness tends to be in the eye of the beholder. Only 7 states appear to specify a particular measure of compactness: Arizona and Colorado focus on contorted boundaries; California , Michigan , Missouri , and Montana focus on dispersion, though in different ways; and Iowa embraces both.
Several of the other principles above may be seen as proxies for recognizing rough communities of interest. For example, a requirement to follow county boundaries may be based on an assumption that citizens within a county share some common interests relevant to legislative representation.
Similarly, a compactness requirement may be based on a similar assumption that people who live close to each other have shared legislative ends.
Considering communities of interest directly is a way to step past the proxy. Most scholarly and popular attention to redistricting has to do with the partisan outcome of the process, though partisan impacts are hardly the only salient impacts. The federal constitution puts few practical limits on redistricting bodies.
Individual districts can be drawn to favor or disfavor candidates of a certain party, or individual incumbents or challengers indeed, the Court has explicitly blessed lines drawn to protect incumbents, and even those drawn for a little bit of partisan advantage. State law, however, increasingly restricts undue partisanship. In , only eight states directly regulated partisan outcomes in the redistricting process as opposed to attempting to achieve compromise or balance through the structure of the redistricting body ; now, the constitutions or statutes of 19 states speak to the issue for state legislative districts, and 17 states do the same for congressional districts.
And both Rhode Island and Washington provisions speak in terms of fair and effective representation, but without much construction by state courts to give further meaning.
Arizona , Colorado , and Washington are the only states that affirmatively encourage districts that are competitive in a general election, in slightly different ways; in each case, this is a goal to be implemented only when doing so would not detract from other state priorities. New York prohibits discouraging competition, which is slightly different. And Missouri purports to establish a structure for both rough partisan equity and competition, though its particular implementation of the terms amounts to negligible constraint in practice.
Note: where minority populations present the possibility of obligations under the Voting Rights Act , those drawing the lines may have to consider partisan voter history to assess racial polarization, no matter what state law provides. Also, it is important to remember that every decision to draw district lines in one place or another has a political effect; lines drawn without looking at underlying voting data can be just as politically skewed as lines drawn with the data in mind.
There are three other notable structural rules that, in some states, govern the location of district lines. New Feature! To download maps for offline use and create comparisons in other applications, visit the section Maps For Download.
Find a State. Process National Overview Redistricting - What is redistricting? Home Process Redistricting Where are the lines drawn? Select a state for detailed information and criteria. Where are the lines drawn? On this page. Equal population The U. Congressional districts. The standard for congressional districts allows relatively small deviations , when deployed in the service of legitimate objectives. States must make a good-faith effort to draw districts with the same number of people in each district within the state, and any district with more or fewer people than the average must be justified by a consistent state policy.
But consistent policies that leave a relatively small spread from largest to smallest district will likely be constitutional. Department of Justice before adopting redistricting plans or making other changes to their election laws—a requirement struck down by the United States Supreme Court in Shelby County v.
Holder On April 20, , the court ruled unanimously that the plaintiffs had failed to prove that a partisan gerrymander had taken place. Instead, the court found that the commission had acted in good faith to comply with the Voting Rights Act. The court's majority opinion was penned by Justice Stephen Breyer. Most states are required to draw new congressional district lines every 10 years following completion of United States Census those states comprising one congressional district are not required to redistrict.
In 33 of these states, state legislatures play the dominant role in congressional redistricting. In eight states, commissions draw congressional district lines. In two states, hybrid systems are used, in which the legislatures share redistricting authority with commissions. The remaining states comprise one congressional district each, rendering redistricting unnecessary. See the map and table below for further details.
In 33 of the 50 states, state legislatures play the dominant role in state legislative redistricting. Commissions draw state legislative district lines in 14 states. In three states, hybrid systems are used, in which state legislature share redistricting authority with commissions.
There are conflicting opinions regarding the correlation between partisan gerrymandering and electoral competitiveness. In , Jennifer Clark, a political science professor at the University of Houston, said, "The redistricting process has important consequences for voters. In some states, incumbent legislators work together to protect their own seats, which produces less competition in the political system.
Voters may feel as though they do not have a meaningful alternative to the incumbent legislator. In , James Cottrill, a professor of political science at Santa Clara University, published a study of the effect of non-legislative approaches e. Cottrill found that "particular types of [non-legislative approaches] encourage the appearance in congressional elections of experienced and well-financed challengers. In , John Johnson, Research Fellow in the Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education at Marquette University, reviewed the relationship between partisan gerrymandering and political geography in Wisconsin, a state where Republicans have controlled both chambers of the state legislature since while voting for the Democratic nominee in every presidential election but one since Today, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to live in both places where they are the overwhelming majority and places where they form a noncompetitive minority.
Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of mandates that electoral district lines cannot be drawn in such a manner as to "improperly dilute minorities' voting power. States and other political subdivisions may create majority-minority districts in order to comply with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Proponents of majority-minority districts argue that these districts are a necessary hindrance to the practice of cracking , which occurs when a constituency is divided between several districts in order to prevent it from achieving a majority in any one district.
Paige Whitaker described this argument as follows: [11]. In addition, supporters argue that the drawing of majority-minority districts has resulted in an increased number of minority representatives in state legislatures and Congress. The American Civil Liberties Union , in a report, made this argument: [38] [39] [40] [41]. Critics, meanwhile, contend that the establishment of majority-minority districts can result in packing , which occurs when a constituency or voting group is placed within a single district, thereby minimizing its influence in other districts.
Because minority groups tend to vote Democratic , critics argue that majority-minority districts ultimately present an unfair advantage to Republicans by consolidating Democratic votes into a smaller number of districts.
Steven Hill, writing for The Atlantic in June , made the following argument: [38] [39] [40]. The link below is to the most recent stories in a Google news search for the terms Redistricting. These results are automatically generated from Google. Ballotpedia does not curate or endorse these articles. Redistricting - Google News. Ballotpedia features , encyclopedic articles written and curated by our professional staff of editors, writers, and researchers. Click here to contact our editorial staff, and click here to report an error.
Click here to contact us for media inquiries, and please donate here to support our continued expansion. Share this page Follow Ballotpedia. What's on your ballot? Jump to: navigation , search. See this article for information about redistricting after the census. File:The Gerry-Mander Edit.
In contrast with racial gerrymandering, on which the Supreme Court of the United States has issued rulings in the past affirming that such practices violate federal law, the high court had not, as of November , issued a ruling establishing clear precedent on the question of partisan gerrymandering.
Although the court has granted in past cases that partisan gerrymandering can violate the United States Constitution, it has never adopted a standard for identifying or measuring partisan gerrymanders. Partisan gerrymandering is described in greater detail in this article.
Gill v. Whitford See also: Gill v. Whitford In Gill v. Harris See also: Cooper v. Harris In Cooper v. Abbott See also: Evenwel v. Abbott Evenwel v.
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