Cite as: 517 U. S. 1 (1996)
Opinion of the Court
"good-faith effort to achieve population equality" required of a State conducting intrastate redistricting does not translate into a requirement that the Federal Government conduct a census that is as accurate as possible. First, we think that the Court of Appeals understated the significance of the two differences that it recognized between state redistricting cases and the instant action. The court failed to recognize that the Secretary's decision was made pursuant to Congress' direct delegation of its broad authority over the census. See Art. I, § 2, cl. 3 (Congress may conduct the census "in such Manner as they shall by Law direct"). The court also undervalued the significance of the fact that the Constitution makes it impossible to achieve population equality among interstate districts. As we have noted before, the Constitution provides that "[t]he number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every 30,000 persons; each State shall have at least one Representative; and district boundaries may not cross state lines." Montana, 503 U. S., at 447-448.
While a court can easily determine whether a State has made the requisite "good-faith effort" toward population equality through the application of a simple mathematical formula, we see no way in which a court can apply the Wes-berry standard to the Federal Government's decisions regarding the conduct of the census. The Court of Appeals found that Wesberry required the Secretary to conduct a census that would "achieve voting-power equality," which it understood to mean a census that was as accurate as possible. 34 F. 3d, at 1129. But in so doing, the court implicitly found that the Constitution prohibited the Secretary from preferring distributive accuracy to numerical accuracy, and that numerical accuracy—which the court found to be improved by a PES-based adjustment—was constitutionally preferable to distributive accuracy. See id., at 1131 ("[T]he Secretary did not make the required effort to achieve numerical accuracy as nearly as practicable, . . . the burden thus shifted to
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