professor persily and others laid out a great foundation, which will save me time, but there are three things i want to tell you briefly the answer before i move on to discussing the conclusions we have reached about issues in citizen apportionment and citizen redistricting. there are three empirical questions that come up that lead us to examine this issue of whether or not political powers shown apportionedp. first is to what extent is the use of one person, one vote, the equalizing of the district and in terms of creating one person, one vote in terms of turnout. the second question isr to participation variations across districts in congressional and state legislative elections, and the third question is what factors exist that structure variations and participation rates among the several states of the union? well, first and foremost, one person, one vote is a legal fiction. much like the census itself. being deemed accurate. in the 1960s before the reapportionment revolution, in most states we'd see variations in the level of turnout between the lowest turnout congressional distr

. >> i first met nat persily when he was a student.organized probably the fairest voting rights symposium at sanford. -- the first voting rights symposium at sanford. i wrote about it. in the article, the term redistricting -- redistricting combines lofty goals, the passion, self preservation, and increasing reliance on technology. to pull and haul rather in delicately at the end. it also involves somebody getting screwed. [laughter] we are now in the middle of the next cycle but many of you know what of my favorite. -- [unintelligible] that which we are, we are. part of our topic today will be why are we here? we are going to set up the rest of the day by identifying and briefly talking about an interactive conversation about the laws that govern redistricting. there are, i think, nine potential constraints. there are three overarching categories. federal constitution constraints on how we get redistricting done. there are federal statutory constraints about how redistricting can be done. and there are state law constraints. we are go