A new perspective on the 1958 congressional election and 14th amendment apportionment

Abstract

Some mid-20th century civil rights activists strongly advocated enforcement of Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect voting rights, but all attempts to enforce it failed due to the difficulty of quantifying the amount of voting abridgment in each state. Using publicly available data it would have been possible to model voting abridgment and thus to reapportion congressional seats prior to the 1958 election. However, the results of a computer simulation suggest that the immediate effect of such reapportionment on civil rights reform would have been minimal.