“Not sure how that’s supposed to work in order to ensure that each representative of a district represents roughly the same number of people.
Going by county, or even just city lines, you’d end up with one representative representing relatively few rural people, and one representative representing a lot of urban people, which goes against the purpose of representative government.”
That’s not correct. The business of having representatives represent the same number of people stems from the ridiculous Warren Court “one person, one vote” ruling in the 60’s.
Previously, legislatures were comprised differently, with towns and counties represented in the legislature. For example, I live in MA, and each town had a representative in the state senate, similar to each state being represented in the US Senate (same principle).
With “one person, one vote” individual towns and counties have been relegated to non-important entities, with representatives representing several towns at once or parts of towns (whatever they have to do to make the numbers even).
We had fully functioning representative government long before Earl Warren and his band of merry men got in the way.
No, that it not correct.
It is a concept directly from the U.S. Constitution with reapportionment of representatives after each census to individual states, with the purpose of giving each state as equal a number of representatives as their population as practical, with some low population states getting just a single representative for the entire state, the minimum number that can be allotted.
That concept of representation at the state level is a continuation of the practice at the federal level.