Electoral Districting, I

• Author: Bernard Grofman
• Pages: 867-869

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The number of members to be elected to a given legislative body and the voting rule by which that body will be chosen are commonly laid down in statute. The United States, like most democratic nations of the world, elects representatives from geographically defined election districts. At issue are the election method, the criteria for drawing district lines (or GERRYMANDERING), specifying who will actually do the redistricting, and the nature of legal and/or administrative review of redistricting choices.

In the United States most elections are conducted under the rule that the candidate receiving the greatest number of votes will be chosen. Congressional elections now take place in single-member districts, but this practice has not always been uniform. Prior to 1842, the smaller states commonly elected members to Congress in at-large elections with entire states as the electorate. At both the state and local level, at-large and multimember district elections in areas of high minority concentration have come under increasing challenge as dilutive of minority voting rights as a result of litigation brought under the VOTING RIGHTS ACT OF 1965 (as Amended in 1982) or directly under the EQUAL PROTECTION clause of the FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT to the Constitution. Both the proportion of states using multimember districts for state legislative elections and the proportion of cities using at-large elections have declined over the past several decades.

In the overwhelming majority of states the legislative body itself is responsible for drawing new plans (usually after the decennial CENSUS). In most states the governor has VETO POWER over state and congressional plans. In some states, legislative or congressional districting is entrusted to nonpartisan or bipartisan commissions.

Many criteria have been proposed to guide districting in the United States and multiple and potentially conflicting "reasonable" goals can be advocated for redistricting decisionmaking. The exercise of state redistricting authority

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is subject to JUDICIAL REVIEW under federal standards involving Article I, section 2; the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; the FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT; and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (as amended); as well as by state courts acting exclusively in terms of state law issues. Until 1993, redistricting case law appeared to be a largely settled area, with no real changes from the 1980s to the 1990s...