Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 37, Number 17, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 March 1905 — New Legislative Apportionment [ARTICLE]

New Legislative Apportionment

Tne new legislative apportionment, a diagram of which is published in this issue, puts Jasper and Wnite counti s together for a representative district. In this combination White will have several more delegates in die contentions than Jasper and therefore the power to dictate things if they themselves can hang together Which is not an invariable characteristic of politics in White. It is a manifest impossiblity to make such an apportionment bill as will’not show a good many inequalities, whil* the constitution forbids the division of counties in I these districts. But by some combination of circumstances Jasper and its connected counties 'seems to have got the hot end of the poker worse than any others in the state. Tnu* the representative unit is 6943, or in other words, taking , the whole state through there is one representative for every 6,943 v >ters. let White and Jasper together have 9,102 votes, or 2,159 j more than the unit. There is no other representative district in the state so far in excess of the unit. This senatorial district also, composed of Jasper, Newton Starke and White counties, is the most freakish in the state. It is the largest in square miles, and also the crookedest. And is the only senatorial district so crooked that the line in the diagram connecting all the counties in it is so crooked that it passes through the same county twice. And Jasper county is the only one so twice crossed. The population of this sens'orial district is also fully 1 000 above the unit