Multimember Districts

In the early days of the House of Representatives several states had at least one congressional district that elected more than one member. The multimember system permitted multiple representatives to be allotted to the more populous area of a state—or perhaps the one with the most political clout—without drawing the district lines to achieve that result.

For example, in 1824 Maryland's Fifth District chose two representatives, while the remaining seven districts chose one each. And in Pennsylvania two districts (the Fourth and Ninth) elected three representatives each, and four districts (the Seventh, Eighth, Eleventh, and Seventeenth) chose two representatives each.

As late as 1840, New York still had as many as five multimember congressional districts: one (the Third) electing four members and four (the Eighth, Seventeenth, Twenty-second, and Twenty-third) choosing two each. But the practice ended in 1842 when Congress enacted a law that said “no one district may elect more than one Representative.” The single-member district provision was a part of the reapportionment legislation following the census of 1840.

At the state and local levels, multimember districts remained commonplace into modern times. Until the 1970s about a third of state legislature house members and a sixth of state senators were elected from multimember jurisdictions. Voters in many city council districts could vote for as many seats as were up for election. Seats in multimember districts are almost always filled by at-large elections in which voters of the whole city, county, or other jurisdiction are eligible to participate.

Protests from racial and other minorities have diminished the use of multimember districts. Opponents contended that such districts diluted minorities' voting strength and violated the principles of proportional representation. Multimember districts were particularly prevalent and controversial in the South until those found discriminatory were struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in White v. Regester, a Texas case, in 1973.

Earlier, in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Congress had acted against multimember districts and other discriminatory practices by requiring federal preclearance of election law changes in southern states. In 1975 the provision was extended to states outside the South.

In a 1986 case, Davis v. Bandemer, the Supreme Court struck down Indiana's multimember districting plan as an illegal form of political gerrymandering. Democrats protested that the Republican-controlled legislature had drawn the district lines to dilute the Democrats' voting strength, especially in urban areas.

A form of at-large voting, called cumulative voting, has gained some adherents as a means for minorities to achieve proportional representation by concentrating their votes on candidates from their minority group. Cumulative voting, however, has not been widely adopted in the United States.