Which states are redistricting

The smaller number reflects the fact that few states have any express legal constraints on congressional districting. In practice, the vast majority of congressional districts — perhaps every one in the cycle — will be drawn to be contiguous. Put differently, all portions of the district are physically adjacent. Few redistricting concepts are absolute, and contiguity is no exception.

For example, the city of Racine, Wisconsin, has a non-contiguous boundary boundaries like this are fairly common by-products of annexation. Water also gets special treatment for contiguity. In most cases, districts divided by water are contiguous if a common means of transport like a bridge or ferry route connects the two sides of the district. Island districts are generally contiguous as long as the island is part of the same district as the mainland area closest to the island or most tied to the island by these sorts of transport routes.

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? By winning an enormous number of state legislative seats and control of 20 additional state legislatures, the Republicans set themselves up to control the map drawing process in approximately congressional districts.

The effort, which caught the Democrats and the Obama team flat-footed, consisted of packing as many Democratic voters as possible into the same district. The result is the stuff of political legend. For instance, in the state of Pennsylvania , Democratic congressional candidates won 2,, votes, which gave them only five congressional seats; Republicans netted fewer votes, 2,,, but accrued 13 seats!

There are three reasons why it will be harder for Republicans to achieve the kind of victory this time around than they did in One is simply that they did such a good job in that their options are somewhat limited.

Second, as noted above, is the fact that so many Republican counties lost population and will thus need to reorganize voters in even more creative ways. The upshot for Democrats is their potential ability to pick up enough seats to nearly offset the Republican gains. For example, even though New York state lost a congressional seat, the Republican districts in the state lost enough population that Republicans could lose as many as four seats.

The Cook Political Report does this kind of analysis on a state-by-state basis. As of this writing, they project Democrats losing 1. And third, Democrats have been mounting a concerted national effort aimed at redistricting. The organization has been supporting candidates, ballot initiatives, and lawsuits related to gerrymandering—an effort that will make it tougher on the GOP to gain an advantage in the redistricting arena.

Ultimately, forecasting the results of redistricting will be difficult because it depends on state-by-state legislative maneuvering. A scene that played out in Oregon last week provides a good example. At the beginning of the process, Democratic Speaker of the House Tina Kotek gave the Republican minority a veto over redistricting maps in return for cooperation on her legislative agenda.

National Democrats reacted angrily, given that Oregon is the only Democratic state that was going to gain a seat and they wanted that new district drawn blue. The plaintiffs, Sue Evenwel and Edward Pfenninger, argued that district populations ought to take into account only the number of registered or eligible voters residing within those districts as opposed to total population counts, which are generally used for redistricting purposes.

Total population tallies include non-voting residents, such as immigrants residing in the country without legal permission, prisoners, and children.

The plaintiffs alleged that this tabulation method dilutes the voting power of citizens residing in districts that are home to smaller concentrations of non-voting residents. The court ruled on April 4, , that a state or locality can use total population counts for redistricting purposes.

The majority opinion was penned by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Harris v. At issue was the constitutionality of state legislative districts that were created by the commission in The plaintiffs, a group of Republican voters, alleged that "the commission diluted or inflated the votes of almost two million Arizona citizens when the commission intentionally and systematically overpopulated 16 Republican districts while under-populating 11 Democrat districts. The plaintiffs claimed that the commission placed a disproportionately large number of non-minority voters in districts dominated by Republicans; meanwhile, the commission allegedly placed many minority voters in smaller districts that tended to vote Democratic.

As a result, the plaintiffs argued, more voters overall were placed in districts favoring Republicans than in those favoring Democrats, thereby diluting the votes of citizens in the Republican-dominated districts. The defendants countered that the population deviations resulted from legally defensible efforts to comply with the Voting Rights Act and obtain approval from the United States Department of Justice. At the time of redistricting, certain states were required to obtain preclearance A jurisdiction subject to preclearance needed to get approval from the U.

Department of Justice before changing election laws or district maps. 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 the table below, click on a state name for details about that state's redistricting procedures. 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.

As of August , twelve states required redistricting authorities to count prison inmates who are state residents at their pre-incarceration address, rather than in the community where their detention facility is located.

Eleven states had those policies take effect with the redistricting cycle, while Illinois' policy was not scheduled to go into effect until These states differed on whether their policy for counting incarcerated persons in their pre-incarceration districts applied to legislative or congressional maps.

Five states counted incarcerated persons at their pre-incarceration addresses for legislative maps only, and seven counted them at their pre-incarceration residences for both legislative and congressional maps. The states' policies also differed on how out-of-state inmates, and inmates with unknown previous residences, are counted. Two states— Colorado and Virginia —count these people as residents in their correctional facility for redistricting purposes.

Seven exclude this group from all district redistricting population calculations. Pennsylvania excluded out-of-state inmates from all district population calculations, but counted in-state inmates with unknown previous residences as residents of their correctional facility.

Federal inmates are counted the same as state inmates in six states, and are excluded from redistricting calculations in two states.

Four states have not addressed how to count persons incarcerated in federal facilities for redistricting. 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. State-by-state redistricting procedures - 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. Congressional redistricting : In 33 states, state legislatures play the dominant role in congressional redistricting.

State legislative redistricting : In 33 states, state legislatures play the dominant role in state legislative redistricting. In three states, hybrid systems are used. File:The Gerry-Mander Edit.