Nesting (voting districts)

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Nesting is the delimitation of voting districts for one elected body in order to define the voting districts for another body.^[1]

The major concerns of nesting are that it may impede the creation of majority-minority districts, and that it may cause cities or other communities of interest to be split into different voting districts and therefore dilute their votes.

Under the 1970 constitution, Fiji had ten National constituencies. Each of them elected one indigenous Fijian member and one Indo-Fijian member on its own, but two national constituencies were nested into one for the election of General electors' representatives.^[2]

The Scottish Parliament and Senedd Cymru are elected using an Additional member system, combining single-member constituencies with a party-list component chosen to ensure overall proportional representation across the chamber. To elect this proportional component, single-member constituencies are nested together within larger multi-member regions. In addition, the single-member constituencies in the Senedd are identical to those used for the UK House of Commons; this was also the case in Scotland until the Fifth Periodic Review of Westminster constituencies.

The US states which have nesting in their state legislatures (with the ratio of lower house to upper):

In addition there are four states with exact ratios (California, Hawaii, New York, and Wyoming) that encourage, but do not require, nesting of legislative districts.^[17] Two other states with uneven lower-upper house ratios (Rhode Island and Utah) encourage nesting between legislative and congressional districts. Six other states (Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Nevada and Tennessee) have lower-to-upper house seat ratios ranging from 2/1 to 4/1, but do not feature nesting in their laws on redistricting.

• The Implications of Nesting in California Redistricting an August 2007 UC Berkeley study by Bruce E. Cain and Karin Mac Donald (link to archive)