4.7 Apportionment of Legislative Districts

In most states, there are a fixed number of representatives to the state legislature. Rather than apportioning each county a number of representatives, legislative districts are drawn so that each legislator represents a district. The apportionment process, then, comes in the drawing of the legislative districts, with the goal of having each district include approximately the same number of constituents. Because of this goal, a geographically small city may have several representatives, while a large rural region may be represented by one legislator.

When populations change, it becomes necessary to redistrict the regions each legislator represents (Incidentally, this also occurs for the regions that federal legislators represent). The process of redistricting is typically done by the legislature itself, so not surprisingly it is common to see gerrymandering.

[1] http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ca...ct_38_2004.png

[2] en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Il...ict_4_2004.png

Adapted from Math in Society by David Lippman, hosted on LibreTexts (math.libretexts.org) and licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Changes were made. License: CC-BY-SA-3.0.