Delimitation Equity Project Resource Guide - IFES

Delimitation Equity Project
The most commonly mentioned geographic factor listed by the countries in our survey is
consideration for local administrative boundaries; two-thirds of the countries identified
this as an important criterion. Botswana’s Constitution specifies consideration of not
only administrative district boundaries, but the boundaries of tribal territories.
Botswana: Delimitation Criteria
The boundaries of each constituency shall be such that the number of inhabitants thereof is
as nearly equal to the population quota as is reasonably practicable :
Provided that the number of inhabitants of a constituency may be greater or less than the
population quota in order to take account of natural community of interest, means of
communication, geographical features, density of population, and the boundaries of Tribal
Territories and administrative districts.
Constitution of Botswana, 1997, Article 65 Section 2
Another geographic feature mentioned frequently is population density or sparseness of
population; this is listed as a criterion in 12 of the countries surveyed. In Malaysia, the
Election Commission is required to weight sparsely populated rural constituencies in a
manner to guarantee their over-representation in the legislature. 25
Two other factors that are sometimes identified as delimitation criteria relate specifically
to the geometric shape of a district: contiguity and compactness. Advocates of these
criteria hold that districts should not be oddly-shaped and that all pieces of a district
should be inter-connected. The election commission in Mexico, for example, is required
to create electoral districts in which the perimeters are regular in shape. Other countries
that specify that constituencies be compact include Albania, Armenia, Bangladesh,
Barbados, Belarus, Dominican Republic, India, Italy, Pakistan, and the United States.
In the United States, district compactness has not been required by federal law since
1929, but when a number of states created some bizarrely-shaped districts in the 1990s
round of redistricting, the U.S. Supreme Court indicated that districts such as the two
North Carolina congressional districts illustrated in the map on the following page were
unconstitutional. 26
25 Article 2 (c) of the Thirteenth Schedule of the Malaysian Constitution provides that “the number of
electors within each constituency in a State ought to be approximately equal except that, having regard to
the greater difficulty of reaching electors in the country districts and the other disadvantages facing rural
communities, a measure of weightage for area ought to be given to such constituencies.” Since ethnic
Malays predominate in the rural areas and non-ethnic Malays reside primarily in the urban centers, this
“rural weightage” has guaranteed Malay dominance of the political system.
26 Although the shape of these districts was not the basis for the Supreme Court’s decision, the fact that the
districts were not compact was considered evidence of an impermissible motive in creating the district
boundaries.
30