Electoral apportionment

Extracted Attributes

List of U.S. states and territories by population

The states and territories included in the United States Census Bureau's statistics for the United States population, ethnicity, and most other categories include the 50 states and Washington, D.C. Separate statistics are maintained for the five permanently inhabited territories of the United States: Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands. As of April 1, 2020, the date of the 2020 United States census, the nine most populous U.S. states contain slightly more than half of the total population. The 25 least populous states contain less than one-sixth of the total population. California, the most populous state, contains more people than the 21 least populous states combined, and Wyoming, the least populous state, has a population less than any of the 31 most populous U.S. cities.

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• Apportionment by country - Wikipedia

  There has been malapportionment of electorates in both the federal and state parliaments in the past, typically in the form of rural areas receiving disproportionately more seats than urban areas. Supporters of these arrangements claimed Australia's urban population dominates the countryside, and that these practices gave fair representation to country people. Such systems were in place in Queensland from 1949 to 1991, Western Australia from 1907 to 2007, and South Australia from 1856 to 1968. In Queensland, the state was divided into four electoral regions between which constituencies were distributed, with rural areas receiving disproportionately high representation. In WA, the area around Perth was limited to a maximum of 60% of seats, despite containing a much larger share of the [...] In most states, the legislature draws the boundaries of electoral districts, including its own, and even court decisions that set aside malapportionment acknowledge that political self-interest plays a role in decisions of the legislature. Legislatures and the majority party can pursue self-interest by gerrymandering—contriving legislative districts to promote the election of specific individuals or to concentrate the opposition party's core constituencies in a small number of districts. Historically some states simply declined to reapportion at all, so that the make-up of a legislature failed to track the evolving demographics of the state. All states now redistrict state electoral districts following each decennial federal census, as Reynolds v. Sims required for Congressional [...] The Australian House of Representatives consists of 151 single-member seats, referred to as constituencies, electorates, or electoral divisions. Seats are apportioned between the states and territories according to a formula based on population, but each state is constitutionally guaranteed a minimum of five seats. Tasmania is the only state affected by this clause; as such, while electorates in other states average around 105,000 to 125,000 voters, Tasmania's electorates average around 73,000 to 80,000 voters. Federal electoral boundaries are regulated by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), which regularly redistributes "Redistribution (Australia)") seats and boundaries to reflect changes in population. Since 1974, federal electorates within each state may not vary in population

• Apportionment methods - ScienceDirect.com

  Practically all democratic countries are faced with the problem of selecting members of their legislative bodies according to votes of their population. The method by which this selection of representatives is performed is commonly known as an apportionment method. Its main function is to transform the election results, which are usually the number of votes for various candidates or parties, into whole numbers which usually give the number of seats in a legislative body. Nearly every democratic country employs its own favourite apportionment method. This immediately leads to the question of which apportionment method is in some sense optimal and most just? This is not an easy question to answer as one can see from the vast amount of literature it has generated. History shows that at [...] It all started with an article in the newspaper “Frankfurter Allgemeine” (FAZ) by Dr. K.F. Fromme which appeared on 14 October 1970, pointing out the difficulties in determining the number of seats each party gets in the various committees pursuant to the 1970 elections in the Federal Republic of Germany. In this election, the CDU/CSU won 253 seats in parliament, the SPD 237 and the FDP 28, giving the SPD/FDP coalition under Chancellor Helmut Schmidt a majority of 265 seats (including the ## On the error function of a general apportionment method [...] One can distinguish between two major types of apportionment methods, namely the majority voting methods and the proportional voting methods. The majority voting method is used, for example, in Great Britain to elect members of parliament and in the United States of America to elect members of the congress. In this method, the eligible voters are divided into voting districts and, in its purest form, each district elects one candidate by majority vote. It is well known that the percentage of members in parliament or congress belonging to a given party need not be close to the percentage of votes this party obtained overall. For this reason, we do not consider this voting method in this paper.

• [PDF] Multiwinner Approval Voting: An Apportionment Approach

  Republican) or, in nonpartisan elections, two factions, one liberal (e.g., change oriented) and one conservative (status quo oriented). Call the parties A and B, and assume that each voter votes for only one party. Let the fraction of voters who support A be f, so the fraction of B supporters is 1 – f. If there are s seats to be allocated, the question that the apportionment methods answer is how many seats are to be received by each party. Let k = 1, 2, …, s – 1. The apportionment method determines thresholds t(s, k) such that party A receives k seats if t(s, k – 1) < f < t(s, k).10 9 Assume one AC voter switches. Then the deservingness value of sequential Jefferson for c1, after a1 is elected, is 6, which is maximal (since the score for a2 drops to 5 1/2) and makes a1c1 the outcome. [...] pairs of candidates are a1a2: 7(4/3) + 5(4/3) = 16; a1b1: 7(4/3) + 5(1) + 2(1) = 16 1/3; a1c1: 7(1) + 5(4/3) + 3(1) = 16 2/3; b1b2: 7(4/3) + 2(4/3) = 12; b1c1: 7(1) + 5(1) + 2(1) + 3(1) = 17; c1c2: 5(4/3) + 3(4/3) = 10 2/3, so b1c1 is the winning pair, which represents all 17 voters. In applying apportionment methods to parties, we have assumed that more than one candidate can be elected from a party. In fact, as Example 7 illustrated for Jefferson, all the winners may be from the same party. The apportionment methods are vulnerable to manipulation. To illustrate, consider the outcome, a1a2, under sequential and nonsequential Jefferson in Example 7. Assume that polls just before the election show that party A is a shoo-in to win one seat (a1) and possibly two (a1a2). If you are one of the [...] Massicotte (2002). “Electoral Systems.” In Lawrence LeDuc, Richard S. Niemi, and Pippa Norris (eds.), Comparing Democracies 2: New 14 Partisan gerrymanders, for seats both in state legislatures and in the U.S. House of Representatives, may not survive current U.S. Supreme Court challenges to their constitutionality (Grofman, 2017). As a remedy, multiwinner elections would seem attractive as a way to combat gerrymandering, although at the federal level their implementation would require repeal of the 1967 ban on multimember congressional districts. In fact, a bill to lift this ban was introduced in the House of Representatives in June 2017 by Congressman Don Beyer (Democrat, Virginia); however, it does not propose the use of approval voting, combined with an apportionment method, that we

• [PDF] Understanding the d'Hondt method - European Parliament

  elections, Routledge, 2016. David M Farrel, Electoral systems: a comparative introduction, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Friedrich Pukelsheim, Proportional Representation – Apportionment Methods and Their Applications, Springer International Publishing, 2014. Jochen Rauber, 'Das Ende der Höchstzahlen? Zuteilungsmethodik für Parlaments- und Ausschusssitze auf dem verfassungsrechtlichen Prüfstand', NVwZ, 2014, pp. 626-630. EPRS | European Parliamentary Research Service 8 ENDNOTES 1 According to John Adams as quoted in HF Pitkin, The concept of representation, 1967, University of California Press, p. 60, a legislative assembly 'should be an exact portrait, in miniature, of the people at large as it should think feel, reason and act like them'. 2 Under this system the voter has one vote but can [...] fraction of a quota. See Electoral Reform Society, European Democracies, London 2004. 4 J Rauber, 'Das Ende der Höchstzahlen? Zuteilungsmethodik für Parlaments- und Ausschusssitze auf dem verfassungsrechtlichen Prüfstand', NVwZ, 2014, p. 628. 5 D Farell, Electoral systems: a comparative introduction, 2011, p. 74. 6 D M Viola, Routledge handbook of European elections, London, 2016, p. 735. In the Netherlands, a quota system is used in a first step, whilst the remaining seats are allocated according to a highest average calculation. In France, the Hare system, combined with d'Hondt, is used in the overseas territories. 7 A. Teasdale, 'd’Hondt system', in A. Teasdale and T. Bainbridge, The Penguin Companion to European Union, 4th edition, London, 2012 (additional website entry). 8 See for [...] of seats if all other parties have gained fewer votes. Apparentement Due to the fact that votes cast for smaller parties can be 'wasted' as they do not amount to enough to obtain a seat, in some countries such lists are allowed to 'pool' their 'wasted' votes, if they announce this before the election, so that they can obtain a seat together, although they had run as separate electoral lists. This is the case in the Netherlands and in Switzerland for example. Further electoral elements with relevance for proportionality The electoral formula used for the allocation of seats is not solely responsible for the degree of proportionality of the allocation of seats. Further elements of the electoral system – alone or in interaction with each other – also have a bearing on the proportionality of

• United States congressional apportionment - Wikipedia

  The phrase "counting the whole number of persons in each State" has traditionally been understood to include non-citizens for purposes of apportionment. ## Reapportionment [edit] 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 "Electoral College (United States)"). 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 (House and Senate seats). [...] | March 4, 1873 | 283 | 40 | 17 Stat. 28 | Apportionment following the ninth census (1870), replacing the 1850 act | | 292 | 9 | 17 Stat. 192 | Supplemental apportionment added one seat each for nine states | | August 1, 1876 | 293 | 1 | 13 Stat. 34 | Colorado admitted | | March 4, 1883 | 325 | 32 | 22 Stat. 5 | Apportionment following the tenth census (1880). | | November 2, 1889 | 328 | 3 | 25 Stat. 679 | North and South Dakota admitted, with one and two seats respectively. | | November 8, 1889 | 329 | 1 | 25 Stat. 679 | Montana admitted. | | November 11, 1889 | 330 | 1 | 25 Stat. 679 | Washington "Washington (state)") admitted. | | July 3, 1890 | 331 | 1 | 26 Stat. 215 | Idaho admitted. | | July 10, 1890 | 332 | 1 | 26 Stat. 222 | Wyoming admitted. | [...] The first apportionment was contained in Art. I, § 2, cl. 3 of the Constitution. After the first census in 1790, Congress passed the Apportionment Act of 1792 and adopted the Jefferson method to apportion U.S. representatives to the states based on population. The Jefferson method required fractional remainders to be discarded when calculating each state's total number of U.S. representatives and was used until the 1830 census. The Webster method, proposed in 1832 by Daniel Webster and adopted for the 1840 census, allocated an additional representative to states with a fractional remainder greater than 0.5.