Wednesday, March 16, 2PM ET webinar "What nonprofits should know about redistricting"

A Nonprofit VOTE Blog article, which includes reader commenting, and an RSVP link:

"Getting a Seat at the Table: What Nonprofits Should Know About Redistricting

Wednesday, March 16th at 2:00pm Eastern

Redistricting is right around the corner and critical decisions will be made that can affect our communities, our missions, and our funding for the next decade. Tune in to learn the basics and find out how your nonprofit can get involved.
Featured Presenter: Justin Levitt is an Associate Professor of Law at Loyola Law School and author of "The Citizen's Guide to Redistricting."
Hope you can join us!"

Definition of redistricting ('apportionment'): Allocation of seats to regional units, or to parties under systems of proportional representation.

Territorial apportionment is usually a process of adjusting the seats allocated to each unit to reflect changes in population. Under the US Constitution, seats in the House of Representatives are divided among the states once every ten years (after each census), with no seat crossing a state line. The UK Boundary Commissions redistribute parliamentary seats every twelve to fifteen years, and normally no parliamentary seat crosses county boundaries.

Within territorial units, the apportionment process then involves the (re‐)drawing of constituency boundaries (in the US known as redistricting, in India delimitation), usually with the aim of equalizing the population (or electorate) per seat, in accordance with the principle of ‘one person, one vote, one value’. This is usually done with regard to stated constraints of administrative convenience, contiguity, geographical, and communication factors; and unstated influences of party‐political advantage. Such a process is open to political manipulation, or gerrymandering .

Alternatively, apportionment may refer to the allocation of seats according to the number of votes a party has received, particularly in the case of list proportional representation . In the Northern Ireland Assembly ministerial portfolios are apportioned according to the number of votes each party attained, according to the d'Hondt formula. Applications of apportionment have a common mathematical structure (and hence face common impossibility theorems ) but this has not generally been realized by reformers who periodically reinvent systems of apportionment that are already in use under another name somewhere else. See d'Hondt; Sainte‐Lagüe; Jefferson ; Webster . 

"apportionment"   The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics. Ed Iain McLean and Alistair McMillan. Oxford University Press 2009. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.  David Weller.  14 March 2011  <http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t86.e58>

 
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