How many districts are in the us

Districts are therefore drawn on equal population, not on equal votes. Adjusting Populations Some states modify their population counts for their state legislative redistricting. Hawaii and Kansas remove non-resident military and Kansas reallocates students to their homes. Recently, Delaware, Maryland and New York passed laws that reallocate prisoners from their prisons to the communities whence they came. The issue at stake is that prison populations essentially constitute filler population since prisoners in most states cannot vote.

The Census Bureau is making available group quarters data sometime in mid that will make it possible to adjust the census population counts for prisoners. More information on this issue can be found at Prisoners of the Census. It may take some time between when the census data are released and when these states will adjust make these population adjustments. Districts that are drawn in these states using the census data may therefore be incorrect until these adjustments are released.

How Equal Is Equal? For congressional districts, the Supreme Court ruled in Karcher v Daggett that congressional districts must have as equal population as possible, unless a state can provide a good reason why they must unbalance their congressional district populations.

Each district has an ideal census population of 1,, State District Court Map. State District Courts by County Report. The Texas Legislative Council, a nonpartisan legislative agency, provides technical and legal support to the Texas Legislature for redistricting. Texas Redistricting. State Senate State House U. The districts set out in bills enacted during the 87th Legislature, 3rd Called Session, apply to elections beginning with the primary and general elections in H.

State House U. 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. Court of International Trade, the U. Tax Court, the U. For more information on these courts, visit the U. Skip to main content. Home For the Public About U. Federal Courts About U. Federal Courts.