Apportionment Act of 1911
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| Long title | An Act For the apportionment of Representatives in Congress among the several States under the Thirteenth Census. |
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| Nicknames | Apportionment Act of 1911, Public Law 62-5 |
| Enacted by | the 62nd United States Congress |
| Effective | March 4, 1913 |
| Citations | |
| Public law | 62-5 |
| Statutes at Large | 37 Stat. 13 |
| Codification | |
| Acts amended | Apportionment Act of 1901 |
| Titles amended | 2 |
| U.S.C. sections amended | 2 USC §2a |
| Legislative history | |
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| Major amendments | |
| Reapportionment Act of 1929 | |
| United States Supreme Court cases | |
| Wood v. Broom (1932) Connor v. Johnson (1966) United States Dept. of Commerce v. Montana (1992) |
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The Apportionment Act of 1911 (Pub.L. 62–5, 37 Stat. 13) was an apportionment bill passed by the United States Congress on August 8, 1911. The law set the number of members of the United States House of Representatives at 435, effective with the 63rd Congress on March 4, 1913. This number included a provision for the addition of one seat each for Arizona and New Mexico when they became states.
The requirement for allocating United States Representatives is found in Article One, Section 2, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution. After the first census, Congress began to pass legislation to dictate the method of allotting U.S. Representatives to the states based on population (see Apportionment Act of 1792). The Jefferson method of apportionment had been in use after the first census of 1790 through the 1830 census, and required fractional remainders to be discarded when calculating each state's total number of U.S. Representatives.Daniel Webster proposed the Webster method, which was adopted for the 1840 census and allocated one representative to states with a fractional remainder greater than 0.5. Prior to the Apportionment Act of 1911, the Hamilton/Vinton (largest remainder) method had been used for this purpose since 1850. In addition to setting the number of U.S. Representatives at 435, the Apportionment Act of 1911 returned to the Webster method of apportionment of U.S. Representatives. Adopted in 1868, Section Two of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution had already removed the three-fifths method of counting slaves, and instead required "counting the whole number of all persons in each State."
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