Alabama's seven congressional districts range from 10,539 square kilometres to 26,971. The largest is 2.6 times the smallest. Nothing else with seven or more seats comes close to that.
| District | Square kilometres | Counties |
|---|---|---|
| AL-5 | 10,539 | 5 |
| AL-6 | 11,802 | 6 |
| AL-3 | 17,826 | 11 |
| AL-1 | 21,043 | 8 |
| AL-4 | 22,966 | 13 |
| AL-2 | 24,772 | 12 |
| AL-7 | 26,971 | 12 |
Compare New York at 1,296 to one, California at 543 to one, Texas at 442 to one.
Why this happens, and why it is not a compliment
Even area follows from even population density, not from good intentions. Alabama has no city on the scale of Houston or Phoenix, and no empty quarter on the scale of the Nebraska Sandhills. Birmingham, Montgomery, Mobile and Huntsville are all mid-sized and reasonably spread out. Draw seven equal-population districts across that and they come out roughly equal in area whether or not anyone was trying.
It says nothing at all about whether the map is fair. Alabama's congressional map was the subject of Allen v. Milligan, in which the Supreme Court held on 8 June 2023 that the state's 2021 map likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The legislature's replacement, passed that July, was rejected by the district court in September 2023, which appointed a special master; the court approved his Remedial Plan 3 on 5 October 2023.
So the flattest area distribution in America belongs to one of the most litigated maps in America. Area evenness and fairness are close to unrelated, which is the reason the number is worth publishing at all.
One caveat on the table above: the boundary file this site ships does not carry a vintage stamp, so I cannot tell you from the data alone whether those seven shapes are the 2021 map or the special master's. The ratio is 2.6 either way, because the litigation moved a boundary and did not move the population density that produced it.
The other flat states
Connecticut comes in at 4.3 to one across five seats, Louisiana at 6.3 across six, South Carolina at 5.7 across seven, Tennessee at 11.6 across nine. Every one of them is a state without a genuine metropolis-and-wilderness split. The pattern holds well enough that you can nearly predict a state's ratio from whether it contains a desert.
Alaska, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming have a ratio of exactly one, for the obvious reason.