<Tr> <Td_colspan="2"> This case overturned a previous ruling or rulings </Td> </Tr> <Tr> <Td_colspan="2"> Colegrove v. Green, 328 U.S. 549 (1946) </Td> </Tr> <P> Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533 (1964) was a United States Supreme Court case that ruled that unlike in the election of the United States Senate, in the election of any chamber of a state legislature the electoral districts must be roughly equal in population (thus negating the traditional function of a State Senate, which was to allow rural counties to counter balance large towns and cities). The case was brought on behalf of voters in Alabama by M.O. Sims, a taxpayer in Birmingham, Alabama, but affected both northern and southern states that had similarly failed to reapportion their legislatures in keeping with changes in state population after its application in five companion cases in Colorado, New York, Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware . </P> <P> Since the industrialization of America (actually that a State Senate was to represent rural counties, as a counter balance to towns and cities, was understood before industrialization) and urbanization of the United States from the Gilded Age onwards, state and national legislatures had become increasingly reluctant to redistrict . This reluctance developed because there existed general upper - class fear that if redistricting to meet population changes were carried out, voters in large, expanding or expanded urban areas would vote for confiscatory wealth redistribution that would severely inhibit the power of business interests who controlled state and city governments early in the century . Of the forty - eight states then in the Union, only seven twice redistricted even one chamber of their legislature following both the 1930 and the 1940 Censuses . Oregon did not redistrict between 1907 and 1960, Illinois not between 1910 and 1955, while Alabama and Tennessee had at the time of Reynolds not redistricted since 1901 . In Connecticut, Vermont, Mississippi and Delaware, apportionment was fixed by the states' constitutions, which when written in the late eighteenth or nineteenth centuries could not possibly have imagined the possibility of rural depopulation as was to occur during the first half of the century . </P>

The warren court ruled that state legislative districts must be equal in population