Redistricing And Apportionment: Complex Political System

Dayvon Turner, Jack Grundy, Anthony Mendez, Antony Nguyen, & Audrey Robinson

Ehi Agboaye

Texas State Government 2306

April 5, 2017

Districting, Apportionment, and the Issues Surrounding these Processes

The United States has a complex political system. You have checks and balances, different levels of government, and bureaucracy. One of the most complex is redistricting and reapportionment. Within the Texas State Legislature and U.S. Congress, apportionment and districting are often an ongoing issue.

Redistricting refers the physical redrawing of political boundaries to accurately represent its population. The redistricting procedure occurs every ten years, once the US census is completed (Class Notes). In Texas, there is one district per

States elect their legislators by single-member districts, so each district is assigned one representative. Reapportionment decides the number of seats a state fills in Congress (Class Notes). In Congress, House seats are directly proportionate to the populations of states, and must be reassigned every ten years using demographics from the Census. For example, out of 50 states, if the percentage of people residing in Texas increases, then Texas receives more of the 450 seats in the House of

The practice of gerrymandering redraws political boundaries to provide an unfair advantage to a certain political party, ethnic group, or constituency. Regions can be manipulated in a way to make a group the majority in the population. The Republican Party of Texas has recently benefited from gerrymandering. Per Maxwell, district lines were redrawn to “allow the Republican voting bloc to maintain control of both the Texas legislature and the U.S Congress delegation” (178). In the same vein, racial gerrymandering exploits district boundaries to exclude racial minorities in elections. A district with large African-American or Latino populations would be redrawn to make their proportions smaller. This type of gerrymandering also ties in with partisan gerrymandering, as minorities are more likely to vote for Democratic candidates. Supreme Court cases Shaw v. Reno (1993) and Miller v. Johnson (1995) have ruled gerrymandering to hinder participation of minorities unconstitutional, stating that the gerrymandered district lines were “irregular and bizarre in shape that they could not be understood to be anything other than to segregate voters” (Maxwell). Unfortunately, gerrymandering continues to be an issue in Texas, and these practices proceed to disenfranchise ethnic groups; albeit, in less obvious