Gerrymanders by Brent Tarter

Author:Brent Tarter [Tarter, Brent]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 20th Century, State & Local, South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV)
ISBN: 9780813943213
Google: i-ONDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2019-10-01T04:16:35+00:00

Map 3. Congressional districts created in 1971

The 1971 acts that drew new districts for the Senate and House of Delegates also faced legal challenges under the one person, one vote rule.14 These laws created fifty-two single-member, multimember, and floter districts for the election of one hundred members of the House of Delegates, and forty single-member districts for election of senators. The 1971 Senate redistricting law for the first time divided some cities and counties to create single-member districts of roughly equal population in keeping with the principles established in the representation revolution of the 1960s and the directive in the new state constitution. The substantial number of military personnel who resided at the naval base in Norfolk complicated the apportionment of the Senate. The General Assembly adhered to military guidelines and census bureau criteria and counted all naval and military personnel stationed—“homeported”—at the Norfolk Naval Base as residents of the census enumeration district that included the base, even though perhaps as many as half of those people were at sea or lived with their families in civilian residences outside the enumeration district or elsewhere in the region.15 The General Assembly created three single-member districts that together included all of the city of Norfolk and a portion of the adjacent city of Virginia Beach. The federal court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled in 1971 in Howell v. Mahan that the General Assembly had improperly counted naval personnel as resident in one of the three Norfolk-area districts and ordered that the three districts be combined into one district with three senators to be elected at large.16 The following year in Mahan v. Howell the Supreme Court of the United States affirmed that order.17

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