Districts, Wards, and Precincts

A congressional district is the geographical area represented by a single member of the House of Representatives. For states with one representative, the entire state is the congressional district. As a result of the 2000 census, seven states have only one representative through the first decade of the twenty-first century: Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming. These members are elected at large by voters of the whole state.

The 435 seats in the House are allocated on the basis of population after each ten-year census. In the forty-three states with two or more representatives, the state legislature divides the state into congressional districts, depending on the number of House members the state is entitled to. Under the Supreme Court's one-person, one-vote rulings, all districts must be as nearly equal in population as possible. (See reapportionment and redistricting.)

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Computer technology enables redistricters to make congressional districts almost exactly equal in population. After the 1990 census, for example, each of Colorado's six congressional districts had roughly 549,000 residents, with a variance of only sixteen persons from the largest district to the smallest. By the redistricting cycle following the 2000 census, several states were able to create districts of exactly equal populations or districts in which the population differentials were no more than one or two people.

Because of the technology available, courts have come to demand nearly perfect population equality among districts. The degree to which this principle has become enshrined was evident in 2002, when a federal district court ruled that officials in Pennsylvania (population 12,291,054, according to the 2000 census) had violated the one-person, one-vote principle, even though the differential between the most populous and least populous among the state's nineteen congressional districts was just nineteen people.

Under court order, the Pennsylvania legislature redrew its district map prior to the 2004 elections so that the districts were equal in population, based on census data. Several other states had avoided litigation by producing maps in which the districts were either perfectly equal or within a person or two.

Critics believe such court rulings have taken the principle of one person, one vote too far by demanding zero deviation in population across districts. Some point out that census data can only be presumed accurate at the time the population is enumerated by the Census Bureau; in this case, spring 2000. By the next day or the next year, the total state population has almost certainly changed because of deaths, births, and migration.

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