Many of my good friends use the terms “redistricting” and “reapportionment” interchangeably. This
is not correct.
Reapportionment is over.
It happened on December 21st when the population of each state was announced. In a matter of minutes a computer at the Census Bureau cranks out how the 435 seats in Congress are
APPORTIONED among the states. This is reapportionment.
We do not have reapportionment in the State Assembly, State Senate, or Board of Equalization because we are not changing the number of seats allocated to California. The US Senate does not have reapportionment because each state gets two Senators and that is the whole equation.
So unless you hear someone talking about apportioning Congressional seats among the states on December 2010 they must be talking about a process that will happen again after the 2020 census.
Redistricting is drawing the district lines for Congress, Assembly, State Senate and Board of Equalization. This discussion goes on for the entire decade.
When I recently looked back at my study guides for law school I notice that they use the words interchangeably when clearly they have no idea what the are talking about. Heck, even Supreme County Justice Sandra Day O’Connor got confused in her opinion in Shaw v. Reno when she wrote “[R]apportionment is one area where appearance does matter.”
Reapportionment has nothing to do with appearance. She was writing about the appearance of a North Carolina Congressional District 12 that was the subject of substantial litigation over the 1990s. She was actually writing about redistricting, not reapportionment. See district here. Note: Some parts of this district were no wider than the I-85 freeway. Some locals commented that if you drove down the freeway with your car doors open you would kill half the people in the district.