Apportionment

APPORTIONMENT

APPORTIONMENT is the decennial computation and assignment of seats in the House of Representatives to the individual states, or the allocation of legislative seats within a state. Article I, section 2, clause 3, of the U.S. Constitution as amended by the Fourteenth Amendment provides for the apportionment of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives every ten years on the basis of population, except for the rule that each state shall have at least one representative. However, this constitutional provision is silent on how the congressmen are to be elected. To remedy the common practice of at-large or "winner take all" elections, the Apportionment Act of 1842 required single-member congressional districts, composed of contiguous, or adjoining, territory. In 1872 Congress legislated that all districts should contain "as nearly as practicable an equal number of inhabitants," and in 1901 it passed a law requiring that districts should be of "compact territory."

Technically speaking, Congress apportions its House membership, and the states district themselves for the election of representatives. After the 1920 census, which showed for the first time that urban Americans outnumbered rural Americans, Congress was deadlocked on how to reapportion its House seats. To avoid future impasses, Congress in 1929 provided for a so-called permanent system of reapportionment that would discourage further growth in the size of the House and would obviate the necessity for further congressional action on the subject. Unfortunately, the 1929 reapportionment act did not specify that districts were to be contiguous, compact, and of equal size. The Supreme Court in Wood v. Broom (1932) ruled that those provisions were no longer in force. Thus, voters complaining of the inequity of districts of grossly unequal population and of gerrymandering could find no law in effect to prevent such practices. Not until Baker v. Carr in 1962 did the Court reverse itself and rule that federal courts could review apportionment cases. In 1964, in a six-to-three decision, the Supreme Court decided the case of Wesberry v. Sanders, ruling that congressional districts must be substantially equal in population. Departing from the precedent established in Baker, and also in Reynolds v. Sims earlier in the same year, the Court did not use the Fourteenth Amendment as its justification but based its decision on the history and wording of Article I, section 2, of the Constitution. The Court stated that this language means that "as nearly as is practicable, one man's vote in a congressional election is to be worth as much as another's."

The Supreme Court has also played a key role in the apportionment of state legislatures. Until the Supreme Court ruling in Baker v. Carr, constitutional standards by which apportionment should be measured were not established. In a group of six state legislative reapportionment cases—collectively known by the name of the first case, Reynolds v. Sims (1962)—the Supreme Court made these major points: the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause "requires that the seats in both houses of a bicameral state legislature must be apportioned on a population basis"; "mathematical exactness of precision" in carving out legislative districts may be impossible, but apportionments must be "based substantially on population"; "the so-called federal analogy is inapplicable as a sustaining precedent for state legislative apportionments"; and deviation from the one man, one vote rule for both houses is unconstitutional even if endorsed in a statewide initiative process or referendum because "a citizen's constitutional rights can hardly be infringed upon because a majority of the people choose to do so."

The equal population (one man, one vote) principle enunciated in Reynolds brought relief from decades of mal-apportionment. In spite of what the 1920 census revealed about urban and rural population, many state legislatures had refused to reapportion either congressional districts or state legislatures to reflect the change in population, thus allowing the rural areas to continue to hold the reins of political power. Rural areas were also legally favored in those states in which the state constitutions provided apportionment based partly or wholly on counties or towns rather than on population. The majority opinion in Reynolds did not attempt to spell out precise state constitutional tests because "what is marginally permissible in one state may be unsatisfactory in another." It endorsed a case-by-case development of standards and seemed to be requiring a good-faith effort to achieve "precise mathematical equality." Left unresolved were requirements for compactness and contiguousness of districts, and the constitutionality of multimember districts. By the early 2000s, apportionment remained a highly contentious and partisan issue, one that neither the Supreme Court nor the Congress had completely resolved.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cain, Bruce E. The Reapportionment Puzzle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Eagles, Charles W. Democracy Delayed: Congressional Reapportionment and Urban-Rural Conflict in the 1920s. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990.

Schwab, Larry M. The Impact of Congressional Reapportionment and Redistricting. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1988.

Calvin B. T. Lee / a. g.

See also Congress, United States ; Connecticut Compromise ; Preferential Voting ; Primary, White ; Suffrage: Exclusion from the Suffrage .