United States congressional apportionment
United States congressional apportionment is the process by which seats in the United States House of Representatives are distributed among the 50 states according to the most recent decennial census mandated by the United States Constitution. After each state is guaranteed a minimum of one seat in the House, most states are then apportioned a number of additional seats which roughly corresponds to its share of the aggregate population of the 50 states. Every state is constitutionally guaranteed two seats in the Senate and at least one seat in the House, regardless of population.
The U.S. House of Representatives' maximum number of seats has been limited to 435, capped at that number by the Reapportionment Act of 1929—except for a temporary increase to 437 when Alaska and Hawaii were admitted into the Union. The Huntington–Hill method of equal proportions has been used to distribute the seats among the states since the 1940 census reapportionment. Federal law requires the clerk of the United States House of Representatives to notify each state government of the number of seats apportioned to the state no later than January 25 of the year immediately following each decennial census.
The size of a state's total congressional delegation also determines the size of its representation in the U.S. Electoral College, which elects the U.S. president.
Constitutional context
Apportionment in the United States involves dividing the 435 voting seats every ten years. As per Article One of the United States Constitution, elections to the House of Representatives are held every two years, and the numbers of delegates are apportioned amongst the states according to their relative populations. The Constitution itself makes no mention of districts.The U.S. Constitution does not specify how apportionment is to be conducted and multiple methods have been developed and utilized since the Article's inception, such as the Jefferson, Hamilton and Webster methods. The Jefferson method was first utilized in 1792 after the first decennial census was conducted in 1790 but was abandoned in 1840 as it favoured larger states such as Virginia, Thomas Jefferson's home state and the most influential state at the time. Hamilton's method was used intermittently for the next half-century and was eventually replaced by Webster's as the Hamilton method resulted in population paradoxes when the House size increased. After the House size and number of congressional districts were fixed in 1941, the Huntington–Hill method became the official method of apportionment and was used in the 2020 apportionment and redistricting cycle. The current method solves many of the issues concerning previous methods; however, it still violates the "one person, one vote" rule established in Wesberry v. Sanders due to systematic bias which gives more representation and power to small states than to residents of large states.
These methods have been the subject of debate for over 200 years as losing or gaining a seat affects representation which is the source of political power. Congressional districts are subject to the Equal Protection Clause and it is expected that they apportion congressional districts closer to mathematical equality than state legislative districts. The U.S Supreme Court in Karcher v. Daggett rejected New Jersey's congressional redistricting plans due to a deviation of less than 1%.
Article One, Section 2, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution initially provided:
The phrase "all other persons" refers to slaves, a word not used in the Constitution until the Thirteenth Amendment.
Following the end of the Civil War, the first of those provisions was superseded by Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment:
The phrase "counting the whole number of persons in each State" has traditionally been understood to include non-citizens for purposes of apportionment.
Reapportionment
Reapportionments normally occur following each decennial census, though the law that governs the total number of representatives and the method of apportionment to be carried into force at that time are enacted prior to the census.The decennial apportionment also determines the size of each state's representation in the U.S. Electoral College. Under Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution, the number of electors of any state equals the size of its total congressional delegation.
Federal law requires the Clerk of the House of Representatives to notify each state government no later than January 25 of the year immediately following the census of the number of seats to which it is entitled. Whether or not the number of seats has changed, the state determines the boundaries of congressional districts—geographical areas within the state of approximately equal population—in a process called redistricting.
Because the deadline for the House Clerk to report the results does not occur until the following January, and the states need sufficient time to perform the redistricting, the decennial census does not affect the elections that are held during that same year. For example, the electoral college apportionment and congressional races during the 2020 presidential election year were still based on the 2010 census results; all of the newly redrawn districts based on the 2020 census did not finally come into force until the 2022 midterm election winners were inaugurated in January 2023.
Number of members
The size of the U.S. House of Representatives refers to the total number of congressional districts into which the land area of the United States proper has been divided. The number of voting representatives is currently set at 435. There are an additional five delegates to the House of Representatives. They represent the District of Columbia and the territories of American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, which first elected a representative in 2008, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Puerto Rico also elects a resident commissioner every four years.Controversy and history
Since 1789, when the United States Congress first convened under the Constitution, the number of citizens per congressional district has risen from an average of 33,000 in 1790 to over 700,000. Prior to the 20th century, the number of representatives increased every decade as more states joined the union, and the population increased.The ideal number of members has been a contentious issue since the country's founding. George Washington agreed that the original representation proposed during the Constitutional Convention was inadequate and supported an alteration to reduce that number to 30,000. This was the only time that Washington pronounced an opinion on any of the actual issues debated during the entire convention. Five years later, Washington was so insistent on having no more than 30,000 constituents per representative that he exercised the first presidential veto in history on a bill which allowed half states to go over the quota.
In Federalist No. 55, James Madison argued that the size of the House of Representatives has to balance the ability of the body to legislate with the need for legislators to have a relationship close enough to the people to understand their local circumstances, that such representatives' social class be low enough to sympathize with the feelings of the mass of the people, and that their power be diluted enough to limit their abuse of the public trust and interests.
Madison also addressed Anti-Federalist claims that the representation would be inadequate, arguing that the major inadequacies are of minimal inconvenience since these will be cured rather quickly by virtue of decennial reapportionment. He noted, however,
Madison argued against the assumption that more is better:
Global comparison and disparities
When talking about the populations within California's reapportioned House districts in 1951, a report from Duke University found that " is not an excessive disparity in district populations, but perhaps larger than necessary." If the House had a similar ratio of representatives to constituents as it did after the 1930 United States census, it would currently have 1,156 members.The United States has unusually large constituencies compared to other OECD countries, the third largest in the world. However, most of this is caused by the United States's large population, which is the third-largest in the world; legislatures typically grow in proportion to the cube root of the population, rather than linearly, meaning larger countries tend to have larger constituency sizes.
Membership cap
The Apportionment Act of 1911 raised the membership of the U.S. House to 433 and provided for an apportionment. It also provided for additional seats upon the admissions of Arizona and New Mexico as states, increasing the number to 435 in 1912.In 1921, Congress failed to reapportion the House membership as required by the United States Constitution. This failure to reapportion may have been politically motivated, as the newly elected Republican majority may have feared the effect such a reapportionment would have on their future electoral prospects. A reapportionment in 1921 in the traditional fashion would have increased the size of the House to 483 seats, but many members would have lost their seats due to the population shifts, and the House chamber did not have adequate seats for 483 members. By 1929, no reapportionment had been made since 1911, and there was vast representational inequity, measured by the average district size. By 1929 some states had districts twice as large as others due to population growth and demographic shift.
In 1929 Congress passed the Reapportionment Act of 1929 which capped the size of the House at 435 and established a permanent method for apportioning a constant 435 seats. This cap has remained unchanged since then, except for a temporary increase to 437 members upon the 1959 admission of Alaska and Hawaii into the Union.
Two states, Wyoming and Vermont, have populations smaller than the average for a single district, although neither state has fewer people than the least populous congressional districts.