The way congressional apportionment works, ie, the way they determine how many representatives each state gets and then how the states carve themselves up into districts, is not exactly the most fascinating issue. Because I am suffering from some as yet un-named psychosis, I found this interesting enough to take a look at the numbers just to see how it works.
What they do is take the the 435 seats and divide that into the population based on the census. That tells you how many people you have to have to equal one representative. The magic number from the 2000 census is 646,952. Divide each states population by that and the result is the number of representatives they get in the House. Every time a state gains or loses a seat or more, it has to then re-draw their congressional districts.
Ideally, each district would have the same number of people in it otherwise the influence of residents of one district is diluted and of others, exagerated. If Rhode Island had 2 Districts and one had two million people in it and the other had two, then those two million would be getting screwed while the two jokers in the other district are kingmakers. Obviously though, it just isn't possible to have perfectly even districts though that should be the goal.
Just to see how that might work out, I took a look at Arkansas and Conn. since they don't have a lot of districts which made it easier to do the math. What I wanted to see was the deviation in population between districts. At some point, if the deviation is too large, I would suspect that maybe whe state politicos that drew the map weren't really interested in equal apportionment but instead were seeking to dilute the strength of their opponents. This is different than gerrymandering which is to draw the map to make it easier for your people to win the district. The point would instead be to lump all the voters from the other party as much as you can into as few districts as you can. They would win those districts but, for example, would win only one or two rather than three or four.
In Arkansas the average deviation from the ideal was 31,467. In Conn. the average deviation was only 3,995. The ideal would be perfectly equal so that if you have 1,000,000 people and you have 4 districts, you draw them up so that there are 250,000 voters in each district. Conn. did a much better job with its 6 districts than Arkansas did with its 4. In Arkansas, more people had the influence of their vote diluted or exagerated than in Conn.
This has nothing to do with right vs. left and I am not implying that anyone is getting screwed here. I just thought it was interesting to see how state politicos could, for whatever purposes, draw up unbalanced districts. You would have to look at each state and compare the number to see what would be the normal variation and what might be so unbalanced compared to other states that it invites more scrutiny to see if there is any mischief afoot. I think it would be interesting to see which states have the least and most balanced districts in terms of simple numbers. Fortunately, my psychosis is not that advanced yet so I am still able to resist the temptation to figure that out for all 50 states.
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