Redistricting Rules, Criteria, & Principles
In addition to legal requirements, redistricting involves many other operating rules and principles. Some rules are a result of policies adopted by redistricting commissions or other entities responsible for redistricting. There are also several "traditional principles" that play a key role map-drawing. Redistricting most often involves prioritizing these rules and principles to achieve the most desired result.
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A Congressional Research Service report describes the rules surrounding the redistricting process in this way:
“Redistricting is a state process governed by federal law. Much of this law is judicially imposed because, in 1929, Congress let lapse its standards requiring districts to be made up of “contiguous and compact territory and containing as nearly as practicable an equal number of inhabitants.” If Congress chooses to legislate again in this area, its authority will come from Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution, granting the authority to Congress to change state laws pertaining to congressional elections.”
Congress, in leaving redistricting rules to the states created a vacuum of guidance that courts have stepped in to fill especially when it comes to equal population requirements, the prohibition on racial gerrymandering and compliance with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Despite the court's intervention, a large part of redistricting consists of best practices that have evolved over the decades; they are more widely known as “traditional redistricting principles.”
These principles are now recognized by courts as general practice standards that have evolved over time, and while they are not necessarily legal requirements (although many states have codified some of these principles), courts often consider the level of adherence to these principles evidence of other constitutional violations. For instance, in racial gerrymandering cases, courts may consider excessively noncompact districts as evidence that race was impermissibly used to draw district boundaries.
Geographic compactness: Compactness refers to the shape of a district and although there are several highly technical measures of compactness, the term generally refers to how irregular the shape of a district is. In most cases, the gold standard for a district’s shape is a circle. In fact, some technical measures of compactness measure how much a district’s shape deviates from that of a circle.
Contiguity when drawing districts: Contiguity requires all parts of a district to be physically connected to each other. At first blush, this stipulation may seem unnecessary, but it is not uncommon for municipalities to be noncontiguous, and often line-drawers seek to include whole municipalities with districts. Other natural complications to contiguity include parts of state or local jurisdiction separated by a body of water.
Minimizing the number of split political subdivisions: The goal of this principle is to discourage smaller political subdivisions such as towns and cities from being split between more districts than it needs to be. Imagine a city split between five congressional districts; many believe this dilutes the cities’ political power unnecessarily, while some counter that this affords its voters more representation.
Communities of interest: This principle encourages the inclusion of like-minded communities within whole districts and discourages splitting them between districts. While the term has a malleable definition, it covers identifiable communities such as media markets, historic neighborhoods, arts districts, unincorporated towns, school districts, utility districts and much more.
Preserving the cores of previous districts: This principle aims to ensure that redistricting does not introduce radical changes to map schemes unnecessarily. Thus, if a congressional map features an East-West district configuration, this principle will discourage the drawing of a new map that changes districts into a North-South configuration.
Incumbent Protection: Ensuring that incumbents remain competitive (or safe) within a district is a long-standing goal of the party in charge of redistricting dating back to colonial times.
Other Principles
This list of principles is not exhaustive, but these are arguably the longest-standing principles of redistricting, dating back to the 19th century in America. More importantly, these six principles have been specifically recognized by the Supreme Court as “traditional” principles. (see, Karcher v. Daggett, 462 U.S. 725 (1983). Other, contemporary principles have evolved over time, and many states have made them requirements in statute, they include prohibitions on the use of political/election data and requirements that districts be politically competitive .
Prioritizing Principles
The principles discussed above may be in statute or may be put forth as policy by the state or local entity responsible for redistricting. A common difficulty when redistricting is when following one principle conflicts with another. For instance, drawing a compact district may require splitting several local political subdivisions that could be kept together in one less compact district. While some jurisdictions give direction on how compliance with principles should be prioritized, many do not. Thus, redistricting consists of a lot of value judgment regarding which principle to prioritize over another in many situations.
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