On Thursday, March 3, Lieutenant Governor Kay Ivey announced the appointments of eleven Senators to the Reapportionment Committee. Among those is Senator Cam Ward whose district includes Bibb, Chilton, Jefferson, and Chilton Counties.
The Senators appointed are as follows: 1st Congressional District – Sen. Trip Pittman (R.-Daphne); 2nd Congressional District – Sen. Jimmy Holley (R-Elba); 3rd Congressional District - Sen. Gerald Dial (R-Lineville); 4th Congressional District – Sen. Clay Scofield (R-Guntersville); 5th Congressional District – Sen. Bill Holtzclaw (R-Madison); 6th Congressional District – Sen. Cam Ward (R-Alabaster); 7th Congressional District – Sen. Linda Coleman (D-Birmingham). In addition, the Lieutenant Governor appointed 4 at-large members: Senator Vivian Figures (D-Mobile); Senator Arthur Orr (R-Decatur); Senator Gerald Allen (R-Tuscaloosa); Senator Bryan Taylor (R-Prattville).
“The purpose of reapportionment is to ensure fairness in elective representation in the legislative branches on the state and national levels,” said Lt. Governor Ivey. “We are going to diligently re-draw districts that are equal in population and homogeneously representative of the people.”
The Reapportionment Committee is in charge of dividing the seven United States House of Representatives seats within Alabama, based upon each district’s proportion of the state population. The preceding decennial 2010 Census is the baseline of determining how many House seats are allotted to each state. The total number of each state's U.S. House seats, combined with its two U.S. Senate seats, constitutes that state's number of electoral votes in presidential elections. Alabama neither lost nor gained any congressional seats and will have nine electoral votes in 2012.
Additionally, the Committee is tasked with redistricting of the 105 Alabama House of Representative seats, the 35 Alabama Senate seats, as well as the 8 State Board of Education seats, based upon population to ensure that each seat has a near or equal number of citizens therein.
In those quadrennial in which the official decennial census is released and the Legislature is involved in the reapportionment process, the Committee is comprised of a total of 22 members; eleven Senators appointed by the Lieutenant Governor and eleven Representatives appointed by the Speaker of the House.
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