At-large

Highlighted in green are the US Congressional districts being states at-large

• Alaska
• Delaware
• Montana
• North Dakota
• South Dakota
• Vermont
• Wyoming

• American Samoa
• American Virgin Islands
• District of Columbia
• Guam
• Puerto Rico
• Northern Mariana Islands

This is a table of every such instance. It shows the situation applied to a small, varying group of states in three periods. The 33rd Congress began in 1853; it ended two years later. The 38th began in 1863; the 50th ended in 1889. The 53rd began in 1893; the 89th ended in January, 1967, the final such period. This was due to the 1964 case of Reynolds v. Sims: the United States Supreme Court determined that the general basis of apportionment must be "one person, one vote."[3]

Since passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and lessening of some historic barriers to voter registration and voting, legal challenges have been made based on at-large election schemes at the county or city level, including in school board elections, in numerous jurisdictions where minorities had been effectively excluded from representation on local councils or boards. An example is Charleston County, South Carolina, which was sued in 2001 and reached a settlement in 2004. Its county commission changed to nine members elected from single-member districts; in 2015 they included six white Republicans and three African-American Democrats, where the black minority makes up more than one-third of the population.

In another instance, in 2013 Fayette County, Georgia, which had an estimated 70% white majority and 20% black minority, was ordered by a federal district court to develop single-member districts for election of members to its county council and its school board. Due to at-large voting, African Americans had been unable to elect any candidate of their choice to either of these boards for decades.[4] Such local election systems have become subject to litigation, since enabling more representative elections can create entry points for minorities and women into the political system, as well as providing more representative government. In the late 1980s, several major cities in Tennessee reached settlement in court cases to adopt single-member districts in order to enable minorities to elect candidates of their choice to city councils; they had previously been excluded by at-large voting favoring the majority population.[5] By 2015, voters in two of these cities had elected women mayors who had gotten their start in being elected to the city council from single-member districts.

The town of Islip, New York was sued by four residents in 2018 for violating the Voting Rights Act by maintaining a discriminatory at-large council system. One-third of Islip's population is Hispanic, but only one person of color has ever been elected to a town seat. As part of the settlement reached in 2020, the at-large system will be abolished and replaced by four council districts by 2023.[6]

Some states have laws which further discourage the use of at-large districts. For example, the California Voting Rights Act removes one of the criteria required for a successful federal Voting Rights Act challenge, thus resulting in hundreds of cities, school districts, and special districts to move to single member area-based elections.

Some jurisdictions have kept at-large city councils and boards. The solution adopted by Cambridge, Massachusetts is to hold ranked-choice voting for all seats.