Apportionment Act of 1911 - Previous Apportionment

Previous Apportionment

The requirement for allocating United States Representatives is found in Article One, Section 2, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution. Following each ten-year census, Congress is required to create a law that establishes the process of apportionment for the next ten years. After the first census, Congress began to pass legislation to dictate the method of allotting U.S. Representatives to the states based on population (see Apportionment Act). The Jefferson method of apportionment had been in use after the first census of 1790 through the 1830 census, and required fractional remainders to be discarded when calculating each state's total number of U.S. Representatives. Daniel Webster proposed the Webster method, which was adopted for the 1840 census and allocated one representative to states with a fractional remainder greater than 0.5. Prior to the Apportionment Act of 1911, the Hamilton/Vinton (largest remainder) method had been used for this purpose since 1850. In addition to setting the number of U.S. Representatives at 435, the Apportionment Act of 1911 returned to the Webster method of apportionment of U.S. Representatives. Adopted in 1868, Section Two of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution had already removed the three-fifths method of counting slaves, and instead required "counting the whole number of all persons in each State."