Redistricting in historic perspective
In assessing the current controversy over Texas Republicans’ proposed redistricting of the state’s U.S. House seats, two historic facts should be considered.
One is that the principle of equal representation by population is well established in American history. In 1787, the Constitutional Convention required the members of the House of Representatives to be apportioned according to population as determined by a Census to be conducted within three years and every ten years thereafter.
This was a remarkable provision — the first example, so far as I know, in which representation was directly linked to population, and in which it was to be adjusted by what was the first regularly scheduled national census.
The Framers were thinking demographically. They were certainly aware of the 1780s controversy in Britain over “rotten boroughs,” in which a wealthy Indian merchant could elect two members of the House of Commons by buying four pieces of property in Old Sarum. Their numbers included Benjamin Franklin, who in the 1750s accurately predicted that the population of the English-speaking colonies would exceed that of Great Britain in a hundred years.