Hello J E Quidam,
Welcome to the site.
I read your post, and interestingly enough me and a group of people now in the county I live in have hired an attorney to make our county commissioners redistrict. You know the law applies from city council districts to Senatorial districts. You must by consitutional law after each census look at the numbers in the district and their can't be over a 10% deviance.
We were suied in 1991 by a group based on the "voters rights act of 1965". That is a statute that basically says if you don't have any minorities elected they can sue and the court will create a minority district. So we went from 5 commissioner districts to 7. Of the 7 (2) are minority districts up to this last election this year the minorities voted out their candidate and elected a white man.
The districts in our county were never laid out right. The district I live in has 2500 more people than the adjacent district. Percentage wise that translates to about 24% more people, which is in clear violation of "one person one vote" federal law.
They were suppose to redistrict after the 2000 cencus, but did not. They like the districts the way they are now. We have one commissioner that has been in office for 36 years. The machine controls the county. They have now agreed to redistrict we are presently fussing over the map we provided them for free, but now they have appropriated $50,000.00 to get another map drawn and pay for the redistricting, our attorney is watching them and they are warned they could wind up in Federal court, they have till December 31st to have an approved map and reasonable date in 2009 for it to come in effect.
I'm sorry I realize I got a little off the topic of your post but, I understand what you are saying and maybe you need to look at he population in your congressional district. You go by population -not registered voters. You could have at any time in a district 1000 or 2000 unregistered voters and all they have to do is register. So population is what the law says.
I will be glad to answer any questions I can for you because I have been through it.
best regards,
odin1
