North Carolina Edges Utah for Extra U.S. House Seat

Thanks to U.S. troops and diplomats living abroad, North Carolina gained an unexpected U.S. House seat at Utah’s expense.

The Tarheel State, which has a large military population, added a 13th House seat while Utah missed getting a fourth seat by fewer than 1,000 people, according to census figures disclosed Thursday.

North Carolina’s surprise gain came because the apportionment figures include overseas military and diplomatic residents.

“If you had not included the overseas diplomatic and military corps in the 2000 count, then North Carolina would not have increased a seat and Utah would have [gained] . . . an additional seat,” Census Director Kenneth Prewitt said in an interview. “Those are the two states where it would have made a difference.”

Every state is guaranteed at least one House seat, with the remaining 385 spots assigned through a mathematical formula that gives the most populous states the highest priority.

North Carolina has 18,360 residents living overseas, compared to Utah’s 3,545, leaving Utah to finish 436th in the race for 435 House seats.

“When you get down to that 435th seat, it doesn’t necessarily take a large count to shift it from one state to the other,” Prewitt said.

For North Carolina, the extra House seat relied on a margin of just 3,087 people. But even with that state’s gain, and taking into account all the other new numbers throughout the United States, Utah needed just 856 more people to beat North Carolina for the 435-member House’s final seat, census figures show.

“If everything else stayed the same, and Utah had 856 more people, then it would have changed,” said Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services Inc.