apportionment

Examples of apportionment in the following topics:

• The Right to Vote

  • Later in the 18th century, the related topic of apportionment began to be studied.
  • The impetus for research into fair apportionment methods came, in fact, from the United States Constitution, which mandated that seats in the United States House of Representatives had to be allocated among the states proportionally to their population, but did not specify how to do so.
  • Some of the apportionment methods discovered in the United States were in a sense rediscovered in Europe in the 19th century, where they had served as seat allocation methods for the newly proposed system of party-list proportional representation.
  • The result is that many apportionment methods have two names: for instance, Jefferson's method is equivalent to the d'Hondt method, as is Webster's method to the Sainte Lague method, while Hamilton's method is identical to the Hare largest remainder method.

• The Politics of Slavery

  • From the very beginning, it was a topic of debate in the drafting of the Constitution, with the slave trade protected for 20 years and slaves being counted toward Congressional apportionment.

• The Legal Ramifications for Slavery

  • In a section negotiated by James Madison of Virginia, Section 2 of Article I designated "other persons" (slaves) to be added to the total of the state's free population, at the rate of three-fifths of their total number, to establish the state's official population for the purposes of apportionment of Congressional representation and federal taxation.

• Legal Changes to Slavery: 1777-1804

  • In a section negotiated by James Madison of Virginia, "other persons" (slaves) were to be added to the total of the state's free population at a specified rate of their total number: the so-called "three-fifths compromise" that was used to establish states' official populations for the purposes of apportionment of Congressional representation and federal taxation.

• The Virginia and New Jersey Plans

  • The New Jersey plan was created in response to the Virginia Plan, which called for two houses of Congress both elected with apportionment according to population.

• The End of the War

  • If they were to be fully counted as citizens, some sort of representation for apportionment of seats in Congress had to be determined.

• Disenfranchising African Americans

  • Apportionment of seats was still based on total population (with the assumption of the usual number of voting males in relation to the residents); as a result white Southerners commanded a number of seats far out of proportion to the voters they represented.

• The 2012 Presidential Election

  • Census changed the apportionment of votes in the Electoral College, potentially altering the allocation of votes among swing states.

• The Warren Court

  • Warren is best known for the liberal decisions of the so-called Warren Court, which outlawed segregation in public schools and transformed many areas of American law, especially regarding the rights of the accused, ending public school-sponsored prayers, and requiring "one man–one vote" rules of apportionment of election districts.