By comparison, in Iowa the legislature is responsible for voting to approve a new redistricting plan using nonpartisan criteria. Because the Iowa redistricting plan must be approved by a legislative body, attempts to influence the drawing of districts in Iowa would count as a lobbying expenditure by a public charity.
A number of organizations provide information on the redistricting process in the 50 states, including the National Conference of State Legislatures , the Brennan Center for Justice , and the Public Mapping Project. Your organization must treat any communications with legislators that express a view on redistricting maps as lobbying, as well as time spent on preparation and research for those communications. For more information on when preparation activity constitutes lobbying, please review our fact sheet titled When Does Your Activity Become Lobbying?
Given that the redistricting process could impact which candidates for office are ultimately elected, charities participating in the redistricting process must ensure that they are not intervening in the electoral process. For any c 3 public charity, staff must be clear when taking positions on public policy issues and advocating for policy change, while avoiding partisan engagement in an election or future election. Whether an organization is intervening in a political campaign on behalf of, or in opposition to, a candidate for public office depends on all the facts and circumstances of each case.
The IRS has not specifically addressed which facts and circumstances are relevant in the context of the redistricting process. Another likely permissible intervention would be urging the body developing the redistricting plans to consider nonpartisan criteria such as population equality, contiguity of districts, or respect for communities of interest during the redistricting process. This is why it is important for public charities to know the rules of the game.
Redistricting is the first step in determining how a community is represented at all levels of government. That is why public charities should work to influence the redistricting process by urging the legislature or redistricting commission to consider nonpartisan factors in drawing district boundaries. By doing so, every c 3 public charity can encourage its community to be civically engaged and to promote the idea of good governance.
Skip to main content. The purpose here is to educate you about redistricting. Redistricting may sound like a complicated and boring process, and the politicians would be happy for you to continue thinking so. We hope that you will become empowered by understanding what districts are and how they are drawn, not only for for you to become involved in redistricting, but also so that you can better interact with your elected officials. What Are Districts?
Districts are geographic areas within which eligible residents vote to elect their representatives. Everyone in the United States lives in a congressional district. You can enter your address here to find the congressional district that you live in, and who represents you.
Note how your congressional district does not overlap with another congressional district. This ensures that everyone has only one member of congress who represents them.
At the bottom of the congressional district look-up tool, there are links to your state legislature's website. All state legislatures have districts, too. Most states have a similar address look-up tool or an on-line map for their state legislative districts.
If you can find your state legislative district, you will note that your state legislative district does not have the same boundary as your congressional district. No state has the same number of congressional and state legislative districts, so these different legislatures must have different district boundaries.
If this was not complicated enough, you likely live in local districts, too, such as city council, county supervisor, school board, and even districts like water and conservation districts, among many others.
While it may seem difficult for you to discover all the districts that you live in, it is important to be able to determine who represents you. Have a problem with your school? Contact your school board member. Your social security check is lost?
Contact your member of congress. Most elected officials have staff to help you with these sorts of problems. They don't care which political party you are aligned with, as elected officials have learned that constituent service builds goodwill even with people of different political parties.
If you do not know who represents you, elected officials know who they represent. If you are a registered voter, around election time you may receive literature in the mail, phone calls, and visits to your door from people campaigning for office. When you vote, you will find that you can only vote for candidates to the offices in the districts you live in.
In single-member districts, like those for the U. House, voters elect only one candidate to represent their district. In multi-member districts, voters can elect two or more candidates. Most United States governments tend to use single-member districts for legislative offices.
In , the federal government passed a law requiring that congressional districts be single member. Single-member districts are not required by the U. You can hold the line drawers accountable by paying attention and speaking up.
Call your state legislators and tell them you want a fair redistricting process. Participate in community mapping exercises where citizens get together and jointly work on proposed solutions. Help change the process. Lawmakers and advocacy and grassroots organizations will propose redistricting reform measures in the next few years. Explore Our Work. Who draws the lines? How should the lines be drawn? What is gerrymandering? How does gerrymandering affect democracy?
When is the next redistricting cycle, and what can you do now? Revised July 3, Photo: AP. Stay up to date. The next most common state rule is a requirement to follow political boundaries, like county, city, town, or ward lines, when drawing districts. By state constitution or statute, 34 states require state legislative districts to show some accounting for political boundaries; 15 states impose similar constraints on congressional districts. Also, if counties or cities have to be split to comply with other redistricting requirements, most state law does not specify whether it is better to minimize the number of jurisdictions that are split, or to minimize the number of times that a given jurisdiction is split.
The former might mean splitting a few jurisdictions into many pieces; the latter might mean splitting a greater number of jurisdictions, but into fewer pieces. As an exception to the general flexibility, Ohio has a rather detailed set of constraints describing how counties and other municipalities are to be split if they have to be split at all.
In California , districts are compact when they do not bypass nearby population for people farther away. In the Voting Rights Act context, the Supreme Court seems to have construed compactness to indicate that residents have some sort of cultural cohesion in common.
Scholars have proposed more than 30 measures of compactness, each of which can be applied in different ways to individual districts or to a plan as a whole.
These generally fit into three categories. In the first category, contorted boundaries are most important: a district with smoother boundaries will be more compact, and one with more squiggly boundaries will be less compact. In practice, compactness tends to be in the eye of the beholder. Only 7 states appear to specify a particular measure of compactness: Arizona and Colorado focus on contorted boundaries; California , Michigan , Missouri , and Montana focus on dispersion, though in different ways; and Iowa embraces both.
Several of the other principles above may be seen as proxies for recognizing rough communities of interest. For example, a requirement to follow county boundaries may be based on an assumption that citizens within a county share some common interests relevant to legislative representation.
Similarly, a compactness requirement may be based on a similar assumption that people who live close to each other have shared legislative ends. Considering communities of interest directly is a way to step past the proxy.
Most scholarly and popular attention to redistricting has to do with the partisan outcome of the process, though partisan impacts are hardly the only salient impacts. The federal constitution puts few practical limits on redistricting bodies. Individual districts can be drawn to favor or disfavor candidates of a certain party, or individual incumbents or challengers indeed, the Court has explicitly blessed lines drawn to protect incumbents, and even those drawn for a little bit of partisan advantage.
State law, however, increasingly restricts undue partisanship. In , only eight states directly regulated partisan outcomes in the redistricting process as opposed to attempting to achieve compromise or balance through the structure of the redistricting body ; now, the constitutions or statutes of 19 states speak to the issue for state legislative districts, and 17 states do the same for congressional districts.
And both Rhode Island and Washington provisions speak in terms of fair and effective representation, but without much construction by state courts to give further meaning. Arizona , Colorado , and Washington are the only states that affirmatively encourage districts that are competitive in a general election, in slightly different ways; in each case, this is a goal to be implemented only when doing so would not detract from other state priorities.
New York prohibits discouraging competition, which is slightly different. And Missouri purports to establish a structure for both rough partisan equity and competition, though its particular implementation of the terms amounts to negligible constraint in practice. Note: where minority populations present the possibility of obligations under the Voting Rights Act , those drawing the lines may have to consider partisan voter history to assess racial polarization, no matter what state law provides.
Also, it is important to remember that every decision to draw district lines in one place or another has a political effect; lines drawn without looking at underlying voting data can be just as politically skewed as lines drawn with the data in mind.
There are three other notable structural rules that, in some states, govern the location of district lines. New Feature! To download maps for offline use and create comparisons in other applications, visit the section Maps For Download. Find a State.
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