Mike Levin — could face more competitive races , based on voter registration. The draft congressional map creates 39 Democratic-leaning districts, 7 Republican-leaning seats and 6 toss-up districts, according to FiveThirtyEight, a political website.
Of the many challenges that the census data delay caused, the Voting Rights Act data analysis may have been one of the most consequential. After population numbers, the second highest criteria is that the district lines must comply with the federal Voting Rights Act — specifically, ensuring that minorities have equal access to electing representatives of their choice.
In the initial scenarios, observers quickly flagged that longtime Reps. While that potential conflict was lessened because Bass is already running for Los Angeles mayor, the draft map resulted in only one district L. That criticism was resolved in the second round of visualizations released and debated last week, which included two L.
The latest maps keep those lines. But James Woodson, policy director for the California Black Census and Redistricting Hub, said concerns remain about congressional districts that split Black communities throughout the Bay Area, particularly in Pittsburg and Antioch. After releasing draft maps for the Central Valley, the commission was inundated with calls from residents of both Kern and Fresno counties, who were strongly opposed to being grouped together in a congressional district.
Kern County residents spoke of concerns about competing water interests, as well as health equity, while residents from Fresno raised issues with the dilution of Latino votes by combining them with Kern County. Fresno County residents also called in with their opposition to the city of Fresno being split into three different congressional districts. One of the cascading effects of preserving two Los Angeles congressional districts with sizable Black populations was breaking up Long Beach.
If commissioners want to preserve the districts in Los Angeles and keep Long Beach together, however, they may need to cross county lines, something they initially tried to avoid. The discussions did yield wins for some groups. The commission was able to keep the Hmong community in Central California together.
Across congressional and legislative maps, most Native American tribes were also kept together. New independent commissions are drawing election districts in cities and counties that could change representation and priorities.
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Toggle navigation Search GovTrack govtrack. What is the law? Congress Members of Congress. Congressional Districts Map. Embed this map on your website How many Representatives should the House comprise? How populous should congressional districts be? What is to be done with the practically inevitable fractional entitlement to a House seat that results when the calculations of proportionality are made? How is fairness of apportionment to be best preserved?
Apportioning the House can be viewed as a system with four main variables: 1 the size of the House, 2 the population of the states, 3 the number of states, and 4 the method of apportionment. Over the years since the ratification of the Constitution, the number of Representatives has varied, but in Congress resolved the issue by fixing the size of the House at members.
How to apportion those seats, however, continued to be an issue because of disagreement over how to handle fractional entitlements to a House seat in a way that both met constitutional and statutory requirements and minimized inequity.
The intuitive method of apportionment is to divide the United States population by to obtain an average number of persons represented by a member of the House. This is sometimes called the ideal size congressional district. The quotient will be a whole number plus a remainder—say What is Congress to do with the 0.
Does the state get 14 or 15 seats in the House? Does one discard the fractional entitlement? Does one round up at the arithmetic mean of the two whole numbers? At the geometric mean? At the harmonic mean? Congress has used, or at least considered, several methods over the years.
Every method Congress has used or considered has its advantages and disadvantages, and none has been exempt from criticism. Under current law, however, seats are apportioned using the equal proportions method, which is not without its critics. Some charge that the equal proportions method is biased toward small states. They urge Congress to adopt either the major fractions or the Hamilton-Vinton method as more equitable alternatives.
A strong mathematical case can be made for either equal proportions or major fractions. Deciding between them is a policy matter based on whether minimizing the differences in district sizes in absolute terms through major fractions or proportional terms through equal proportions is most preferred by Congress.
Then a state's population is divided by the ideal size to determine the number of Representatives to be allocated to that state. One of the fundamental issues before the framers at the Constitutional Convention in was the allocation of representation in Congress between the smaller and larger states.
The Constitution provided the first apportionment of House seats: 65 Representatives were allocated among the states based on the framers' estimates of how seats might be apportioned following a census. Amendment XIV, section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers Article 1, section 2. The number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at least one Representative From its beginning in , Congress was faced with questions about how to apportion the House of Representatives—questions that the Constitution did not answer.
How populous should a congressional district be on average? Moreover, no matter how one specified the ideal population of a congressional district or the number of Representatives in the House, a state's ideal apportionment would, as a practical matter, always be either a fraction, or a whole number and a fraction—say, Thus, another question was whether that state would be apportioned 14 or 15 representatives?
Consequently, these two major issues dominated the apportionment debate: how populous a congressional district ought to be later re-cast as how large the House ought to be , and how to treat fractional entitlements to Representatives.
The questions of how populous a congressional district should be and how many Representatives should constitute the House have received little attention since the number of Representatives was last increased from to after the Census. Various methods were considered and some were tried, each raising questions of fundamental fairness. The issue of fairness could not be perfectly resolved: inevitable fractional entitlements and the requirement that each state have at least one representative lead to inevitable disparities among the states' average congressional district populations.
Congress, which sought an apportionment method that would minimize those disparities, continued this debate until , when it enacted the "equal proportions" method—the apportionment method still in use today for a full explanation of this method, see below. The process of apportioning seats in the House is constrained both constitutionally and statutorily.
As noted previously, the Constitution defines both the maximum and minimum size of the House. There can be no fewer than one Representative per state, and no more than one for every 30, persons. The Apportionment Act of , in addition to specifying the apportionment method, sets the House size at , requires an apportionment every 10 years, and mandates administrative procedures for apportionment. The President is required to transmit to Congress "a statement showing the whole number of persons in each state" and the resulting seat allocation within one week after the opening of the first regular session of Congress following the census.
The Census Bureau has been assigned the responsibility of computing the apportionment. As a matter of practice, the Director of the Bureau reports the results of the apportionment at the end of December of the census year. Once received by Congress, the Clerk of the House of Representatives is charged with the duty of sending to the governor of each state a "certificate of the number of Representatives to which such state is entitled" within 15 days of receiving notice from the President.
An intuitive way to apportion the House is through simple rounding a method never adopted by Congress. First, the U. Then, each state's population is divided by the "ideal" district population. In most cases this will result in a whole number and a fractional remainder, as noted earlier. Each state will definitely receive seats equal to the whole number, and the fractional remainders will either be rounded up or down at the.
There are two fundamental problems with using simple rounding for apportionment, given a House of fixed size. First, it is possible that some state populations might be so small that they would be "entitled" to less than half a seat.
Yet, the Constitution requires that every state must have at least one seat in the House. Thus, a method that relies entirely on rounding will not comply with the Constitution if there are states with very small populations. Second, even a method that assigns each state its constitutional minimum of one seat, and otherwise relies on rounding at the.
Thus, this intuitive way to apportion fails because, by definition, it does not take into account the constitutional requirement that every state have at least one seat in the House and the statutory requirement that the House size be fixed at The current apportionment method the method of equal proportions established by the act satisfies the constitutional and statutory requirements. Although an equal proportions apportionment is not normally computed in the theoretical way described below, the method can be understood as a modification of the rounding scheme described above.
First, the "ideal" sized district is found by dividing the apportionment population by to serve as a "trial" divisor. Then each state's apportionment population is divided by the "ideal" district size to determine its number of seats. Rather than rounding up any remainder of. A geometric mean of two numbers is the square root of the product of the two numbers. For example, for the apportionment, the "ideal" size district of , had to be adjusted upward to between , and , 11 to produce a member House.
Because the divisor is adjusted so that the total number of seats will equal , the problem of the "floating" House size is solved. The constitutional requirement of at least one seat for each state is met by assigning each state one seat automatically regardless of its population size.
Although the process of determining an apportionment through a series of trials using divisions near the "ideal" sized district as described above works, it is inefficient because it requires a series of calculations using different divisors until the total is reached. Accordingly, the Census Bureau determines apportionment by computing a "priority" list of state claims to each seat in the House. During the early 20 th century, Walter F. Willcox, a Cornell University mathematician, determined that if the rounding points used in an apportionment method are divided into each state's population the mathematical equivalent of multiplying the population by the reciprocal of the rounding point , the resulting numbers can be ranked in a priority list for assigning seats in the House.
Such a priority list does not assume a fixed House size because it ranks each of the states' claims to seats in the House so that any size House can be chosen easily without the necessity of extensive re-computations.
The traditional method of constructing a priority list to apportion seats by the equal proportions method involves first computing the reciprocals 14 of the geometric means the "rounding points" between every pair of consecutive whole numbers representing the seats to be apportioned. It is then possible to multiply by decimals rather than divide by fractions the former being a considerably easier task.
For example, the reciprocal of the geometric mean between 1 and 2 1. These reciprocals for all pairs 1 to 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 4, etc. In order to construct the "priority list," each state's apportionment population is multiplied by each of the multipliers.
The resulting products are ranked in order to show each state's claim to seats in the House. For example, see Table 2 , below assume that there are three states in the Union California, New York, and Florida and that the House size is set at 30 Representatives. The first seat for each state is assigned by the Constitution; so the remaining 27 seats must be apportioned using the equal proportions formula. The apportionment populations for these states were 37,, for California, 19,, for New York, and 18,, for Florida.
Once the priority values are computed, they are ranked with the highest value first. The resulting ranking is numbered and seats are assigned until the total is reached. By using the priority rankings instead of the rounding procedures described earlier in this paper under " The Formula in Theory ," it is possible to see how an increase or decrease in the House size will affect the allocation of seats without the necessity of additional calculations.
Table 1. Multiplier a. More specifically, for this example in Table 2 , the computed priority values column six for each of the three states are ordered from largest to smallest.
By constitutional provision, seats one to three are given to each state. The next determination is the fourth seat in the hypothesized chamber. California's claim to a second seat, based on its priority value, is 26,, Based on the priority values, California has the highest claim for its second seat and is allocated the fourth seat in the hypothesized chamber.
Table 2. Notes: The Constitution requires that each state have at least one seat. Consequently, the first three seats assigned are not included in the table.
Table prepared by CRS. Next, the fifth seat's allocation is determined. California's claim to a third seat, based on the computed priority value, is 15,, Again, California has a higher priority value, and is allocated its third seat, the fifth seat in the hypothesized chamber. Next the sixth seat's allocation is determined in the same fashion. California's claim to a fourth seat, based on the computed priority value, is 10,, As New York's priority value is higher than either California's or Florida's, it is allocated its second seat, the sixth seat in the hypothesized chamber.
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