Glossary

Terms

District

A group of neighborhoods that vote together to pick one representative for a specific office.

Precinct

The smallest geographic unit of election administration — the polling place assignment for a group of nearby voters. Precincts sit inside districts, not the other way around.

Apportionment

The process of dividing the 435 seats of the U.S. House of Representatives among the fifty states based on population, done after each ten-year Census.

Redistricting

The process of drawing the geographic lines of a district. In Tennessee, congressional and state legislative districts are drawn by the state legislature.

Gerrymandering

A contested claim, not a neutral measurement, that a district map was drawn to advantage or disadvantage a particular group or party. Guide the Vote does not apply this label to any map. You will see this word on this site only inside an attributed quotation, a court ruling, a legal filing, or a named expert's opinion.

Compactness

A general term for how geographically clustered a district's shape is. There is no single legal definition.

Community of interest

A group of residents who share common policy concerns — economic, cultural, or geographic — often argued for or against by parties in a redistricting dispute.

Cracking

A term used in redistricting litigation for splitting a cohesive group of voters across multiple districts so that they cannot elect a candidate of their choice in any of them.

Packing

A term used in redistricting litigation for concentrating a group of voters into a single district so that the group's overall influence in surrounding districts is reduced.

At-large representation

A form of representation in which every voter in a jurisdiction votes on every seat, rather than being sorted into districts that each elect one representative.

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