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June 29, 2004
Redistricting
There has been a lot of chatter regarding redistricting lately (see SCOTUS blog and Election Law Blog) and something possibly being in the works, though I'll go on a limb and predict no change, ie the status quo, will keep up.
It's gotten me wondering, especially with the Canadian elections last night, is redistricting an American thing or do other countries do it as well? It seems like Britain, England, France etc use pretty defined districts (or ridings or whatever) to elect members of their lower houses and it doesn't seem like they adjust them for population variance as often as we do. And that might account for the huge swings that you can see in a parliamentary election from one party to another, though I have a hard time coming up with a rationale to explain exactly how that would work.
The only thing I can kind of think of is how the counties in Georgia swung from heavily pro-Barnes in '98 (he maybe won 120 out of 159) to just as heavily pro-Perdue in '02 (he won a similar majority as Barnes had). If we still had the old county unit system for electing our state house you might have seen a huge Republican swing but the reality is about 60 of these counties that swung from one party to another in a statewide race might only make up 6 or 7 senate districts and 20 house districts.
UPDATE: I've done some quick research and it seems that Canada allows 25% deviation (so the lines probably don't change much) and that the actual parliamentary body takes care of the process through committees -- no letting the provincial legislatures handle it like in the states. And also that Britain has a "Boundary Committee" that seems intent on making adjustments to local districts but I'm unclear regarding their House of Commons.
Posted by Chris at June 29, 2004 01:28 PM
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