The Court hopes that the moderate steps taken by this order may be enough to break the stranglehold. They certainly will not suffice as any permanent reapportionment. If they should prove insufficient to break the stranglehold, the Court remains under the solemn duty to relieve the plaintiffs and other citizens like situated from further denial of the equal protection of the laws. That much must be accomplished before there can be a final disposition of this case.
... the apportionment of the Alabama Legislature as herein ordered remain in effect without change, except by order of this Court, until the Legislature of the State of Alabama reapportions itself ... after the next decennial census to be conducted in 1970.... [Unpublished decree.]
... In our opinion, however, the evidence offered in support of the plaintiffs' claims, if such evidence is substantiated by the 1970 decennial census and by the further evidence then available, makes out a strong case for the consideration of the Legislature of Alabama.
By holding that as a federal constitutional requisite both houses of a state legislature must be apportioned on a population basis, we mean that the Equal Protection Clause requires that a State make an honest and good faith effort to construct districts, in both houses of its legislature, as nearly of equal population as is practicable.
... careful judicial scrutiny must of course be given, in evaluating state apportionment schemes, to the character as well as the degree of deviations from a strict population basis. But if, even as a result of a clearly rational state policy of according some legislative representation to political subdivisions, population is submerged as the controlling consideration in the apportionment of seats in the particular legislative body, then the right of all of the State's citizens to cast an effective and adequately weighted vote would be unconstitutionally impaired.
TABLE I | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
Range of % of Deviation10 in House | Total Deviation11 in House | Range of % of Deviation in Senate | Total Deviation in Senate | |
Attorney General's Plan #112 | +18.70% to -29.15% | 47.85% | +17.49% to -20.93% | 38.42% |
Attorney General's Plan #2 | +15.20% to -14.77% | 29.97% | + 6.37% to -17.91% | 24.28% |
Attorney General's Plan #3 | +26.79% to -25.55% | 52.34% | +10.77% to -20.93% | 31.70% |
Pierre Pelham's Plan | +13.45% to -15.20% | 28.65% | +14.39% to -11.59% | 25.98% |
... [L]ocal legislative bodies frequently have fewer representatives than do their state and national counterparts and ... some local legislative districts may have a much smaller population than do congressional and state legislative districts ... [these facts] lend support to the argument that slightly greater percentage deviations may be tolerable *935 for local government apportionment schemes, cf. Reynolds v. Sims, supra, at 578.
We emphasize that our decision is based on the long tradition of overlapping function and dual personnel in Rockland County government and on the fact that the plan before us does not contain a built in bias tending to favor particular political interests or geographic areas. And nothing we say today should be taken to imply that even these factors could justify substantially greater deviations from population equality.
The house of representatives shall consist of not more than one hundred and five members, unless new counties shall be created, in which event each new county shall be entitled to one representative.
TABLE II | |||
---|---|---|---|
Range of Percentage of Deviation17 | Total Deviation18 | Ratio of Most Populated District to Least Populated District | |
House | +1.08% to -1.15% | 2.23% | 1.02 to 1 |
Senate | +0.67% to -0.72% | 1.39% | 1.01 to 1 |
... Limitations on the frequency of reapportionment are justified by the need for stability and continuity in the organization of the legislative system, although undoubtedly reapportioning no more frequently than every 10 years leads to some imbalance in the population of districts toward the end of the decennial period and also to the development of resistance to change on the part of some incumbent legislators. In substance, we do not regard the Equal Protection Clause as requiring daily, monthly, annual or biennial reapportionment, so long as a State has a reasonably conceived plan for periodic readjustment of legislative representation. While we do not intend to indicate that decennial reapportionment is a constitutional requisite, compliance with such an approach would clearly meet the minimal requirements for maintaining a reasonably current scheme of legislative representation. And we do not mean to intimate that more frequent reapportionment would not be constitutionally permissible or practicably desirable. But if reapportionment were accomplished with less frequency, it would assuredly be constitutionally suspect.
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