The Census and Political Power
An expanding source of power
Under the Constitution of the United States a decennial count of all residents of the states of the United States of America was to be used to allocate seats in the House of Representatives among the states. Each state received one seat and then remaining seats were divided among the states based upon population. There was no limit placed on the number of Members of the House of Representative although no seat was to represent fewer than 33,000 residents.
However, until 1962, state legislatures were given a virtually free hand to draw district boundaries. The Constitution said nothing about equal representation within states. The failure to speak on this issue reflected the supremacy granted to states that had surrendered their soverignity to form a “more perfect union”
For example, in 1930, New York's largest district contained 776,400 voters versus only 90,700 for its smallest. In 1962, the Supreme Court changed this practice, declaring the "one man, one vote" principle, which required state legislatures to draw congressional districts that are equal in population.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 carried this principle one step further, requiring state legislatures to, wherever possible, draw districts that grant African-Americans, and later, Hispanics, a majority of the population within the district, thereby increasing the opportunity for those groups to elect representatives of their own ethnicity. When combined with the "one man, one vote" principle, this legal requirement expanded the need for an accurate head count by geographic area.
In 1975, Congress expanded the census' responsibility for legislative redistricting again. The new law required the Census Bureau to provide population counts for small geographic areas to state legislatures and governors so that those legislatures could also be redistricted.
In 1999 the Supreme Court ruled that statistical sampling and adjustment could not be used to apportion Congressional seats, although it can be used for apportioning state legislative seats and for allocation of federal and state expenditures.
