My congressional district was changed since the last election. In 2002 I voted in congressional district 1 (I think) for David Wu. Now I am in District 3 or 4 (i'm not sure on the numbers) for Darleen Hooley. The redistricting may have been why the RNC thought they had a good shot at both of these seats. It is difficult to imagine exactly how they would create a new district. The largest congressional district of course in the 5th one but that has the least population. Couldn't really split it. Here they will have to do some serious work to get it right. Montana on the otherhand would be pretty easy to district. Maybe they should just do a major rework on all of the districts thorughout the states with specific guidelines against jerrymandering (sp) . This data is old but it is what is what I could find quickly on google. In 1998 the least population congressional district was Wyoming (big surprise there) with a population of 475503 and Rhode Island's districts were 501696 and 501798. Oklahoma however had three of the most population congressional districts with 1048270
1021721 and 981077. OK Must have gotten in new congressional seat but I'm sure that it still isn't very even. How close can the government get to real parity in congressional district population and what would be needed to do it and what should be the goals in writing congressional districts. Can they be drawn in a way that improves American politics. There are definately problems. If you could rewrite all the congressional districts or alter the rules how would you do it. There are some that think that all states regardless of the population should have two reps. The total number of reps we have now is really arbitray, for Puerto Rico to become a state, or DC Guam, The VIs for that matter to get reps their will need to be some serious working out to do. The Virgina Islands 123,498 and Guam 160796 both have a population a quarter the size of Wyoming 498,703. Puerto Rico has a population of 3,957,988 (about the same as Kentucky). DC's population is 563,384 so more than the whole state of Wyoming. You can see why it bugs them that they don't have a rep.
http://sobek.colorado.edu/~esadler/districtdatawebsite/CongressionalDistrictDatasetwebpage.htm
