Facts
Voters from Jefferson County, Alabama, home to the state's largest city of Birmingham, had challenged the apportionment of the Alabama Legislature. The Alabama Constitution provided that there be at least one representative per county and as many senatorial districts as there were senators. Ratio variances as great as 14 to 1 from one senatorial district to another existed in the Alabama Senate (i.e., the number of eligible voters voting for one senator was in one case 14 times the number of voters in another).
Having already overturned its ruling that redistricting was a purely political question in Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186 (1962), the Court went further in order to correct what seemed to it to be egregious examples of malapportionment which were serious enough to undermine the premises underlying republican government. Before Reynolds, urban counties were often drastically underrepresented.
Among the more extreme pre-Reynolds disparities (compiled by Congressman Morris K. Udall):
- In the Connecticut General Assembly, one House district had 191 people; another, 81,000 (424 times more).
- In the New Hampshire General Court, one township with three people had a Representative in the lower house; this was the same representation given another district with a population of 3,244. The vote of a resident of the first township was therefore 1,081 times more powerful at the Capitol.
- In the Utah State Legislature, the smallest district had 165 people, the largest 32,380 (196 times the population of the other).
- In the Vermont General Assembly, the smallest district had 36 people, the largest 35,000, a ratio of almost 1,000 to 1.
- Los Angeles County, California, then with 6 million people, had one member in the California State Senate, as did the 14,000 people of one rural county (428 times more).
- In the Idaho Legislature, the smallest Senate district had 951 people; the largest, 93,400 (97 times more).
- In the Nevada Senate, 17 members represented as many as 127,000 or as few as 568 people, a ratio of 224 to 1.
Read more about this topic: Reynolds V. Sims
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)