Some states hold their state districts to stricter population equality limits than the federal constitution requires. This is not a hard line: a state plan may be upheld if there is a compelling reason for a larger disparity, and a state plan may be struck down if a smaller disparity is not justified by a good reason. Over a series of cases, it has become accepted that a plan will be constitutionally suspect if the largest and smallest districts are more than ten percent apart. State and local legislative districts have a bit more flexibility on the numbers they have to be “ substantially” equal.As in prior decades, the Census counts will include everyone for purposes of apportionment. Litigation over the issue hit procedural hurdles as it was unclear whether the data would be ready in time for President Trump to make the determination he’d flagged ultimately, the data were delayed long enough for the Biden Administration to reverse course. On July 21, 2020, President Trump purported to suggest that he had the authority to exclude undocumented individuals from the census count - if valid, that would have affected not only how many districts the states got, but how those districts were divided within a state. After the Civil War, we amended the Constitution to ensure that each and every individual present in the country would be represented in federal districts. These population counts are calculated based on the total number of people in each state, including children, noncitizens, and others not eligible to vote. In 2012, for example, the Supreme Court approved a congressional plan in West Virginia with 0.79% population variation based on keeping county lines intact. But consistent policies that leave a relatively small spread from largest to smallest district will likely be constitutional. States must make a good-faith effort to draw districts with the same number of people in each district within the state, and any district with more or fewer people than the average must be justified by a consistent state policy. The standard for congressional districts allows relatively small deviations, when deployed in the service of legitimate objectives. Constitution requires that each district have about the same population: each federal district within a state must have about the same number of people, each state district within a state must have about the same number of people, and each local district within its jurisdiction must have about the same number of people. But in a lot of ways I find keeping the familiar shapes and redrawing the borders to be more evocative.The U.S. You can, of course, illustrate many of these same points about population density with a cartogram, which takes familiar borders and then scales the size of the country to match its population. The division of Italy into what amounts to two halves is reminiscent of the Lega Nord party's platform in Italy, and the fact that Italy can be divided in this exercise while a whole bunch of Nordic and Baltic countries need to be lumped together shows that the basic math of a smaller Italy works. These redrawn lines help us see how skewed the UK's population is toward London and the Southeast. China may be a single political unit, but it contains more Canadas' worth of people than Europe and North America combined. This slice of the map is a powerful reminder that while broad generalizations are always risky, they're especially deadly when it comes to the super-giant countries of Asia. Population density is higher in this region than anywhere else on earth, so dividing up your Indias and your Chinas into Canada-size bits entails drastic transformation. The changes are particularly drastic in Asia: Mexico is chopped up into about three countries, and Central America is generally united into one. So are the islands of the Caribbean Basin. There's another recognizable shape here in the form of a basically California-ish country. It turns out that Canada contains approximately 1/200th of the world's population, so its borders are unchanged in this scenario. Zoom in on North America, and you can get a grounding in how this works: It's somewhat reminiscent of Neil Freeman's plan to redraw the US states to be equal in population, but since frayuk's map is global in scale, it's less familiar. To me, redditor frayuk's new map of the world divided into 200 countries with equal populations hits both of those bugs. Maps are a great way to illustrate the world, but I've always been fascinated by maps that illustrate worlds that might have been.
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