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Lunenburg County officials will spend the next 60 days working on a new redistricting map for the county’s Board of Supervisors members.

What this means for voters is some citizens will be voting at different precincts in 2022, electing a different Board of Supervisor than in past elections.

The redirecting is required by law and takes place once every 10 years following the United States Census.

“When the country takes a census, the count affects everyone from the county to the State House of Delegates and State Senate to the United States Congress,” Supervisor Mike Hankins said.

“This is just one of the reasons why it is so important that everyone gets counted in the census.”

Redirecting is done to ensure that citizens have nearly as is practicable representation in proportion to the population of the district.

According to Hankins, redistricting will affect all members of the BOS to some degree.

Hankins said there are about three districts that lost citizens according to the 2020 census and four districts that stayed about the same.

“The district that stayed the same will lose people, while the district that lost people will gain people from those districts,” Hankins said. “It is very important that each of us represents close to the same number of people. If we did not make these adjustments, we could have two supervisors representing 5,000 people and the other five representing about 100 each. This would not be good, and no one would want to see this.”    

Another factor that will come into play for Lunenburg during redistricting is that legislation passed in 2020 requires that individuals incarcerated in federal, state or local prisons whose address at the time of incarceration was located in Virginia be counted at their home address for redistricting purposes.

This means those incarcerated at Lunenburg Correctional Center will not be counted as Lunenburg residents unless their home address is in Lunenburg.

Data from the 2020 U.S. Census shows Lunenburg County’s population has declined by 8.1% since 2010. The population, according to data from the U.S. Census, fell from 12,914 to 11,936.