An Overview on Redistricting

       Redistricting is known as the process that happens every ten years to districts because of our growth and other general changes in our country's population. This is to ensure that the districts try and remain as fair and equally represented as they possibly can. However redistricting is not always as simple as it may seem and has a fair amount of guidelines and rules that are necessary to follow.

       The first and most likely biggest important piece of criteria for redistricting would have to be making sure that everyone has fair and equal population. Most people would probably think that this would be a basic commonsensical rule for everyone to abide by, but it wasn't actually until the ruling of Baker vs. Carr that the supreme court intervened in the redistricting realm and started to mandate certain critical rules be followed. If this rule had not been mandated then some districts would be allowed to grow unchecked thereby having a much higher amount population than other counties and messing up the idea of "equal representation".

      Another important aspect of redistricting is making sure that the district map lines actually look normal. Or in other words, these lines can't look peculiar or as an obvious way to "cheat the system". Sometimes district lines can be drawn so that certain parts of the district are very far apart from each other, and therefore tend to not even have a clear line of communication, this would allow people to use sheer numbers of that district's population for votes, but obviously this is not a fair way to do things.

    Another large factor taken into account that may have more of an effect on some districts than others, is the  issue of race. The supreme court declared that race must be taken into account when redistricting in order to assure that minorities are some-what represented.

      Redistricting criteria also sometimes involves aspects beyond land and population size such as overall Incumbent protection. The reasons for this rule are first so that, they can receive seniority in Congress which of course helps their party in the long run to accomplish the things that they want to do. Another benefit to this is that the incumbent might actually be popular and a good representative anyways. Out of all the rules, I tend to not agree with this one the strongest because I think that reasoning such as "seniority" just solidifies the tendency of politicians to do things for their own personal gain, instead of purely for the good of the people.