The Senate shall consist of thirty-five members. Senatorial districts shall at all times consist of contiguous territory, and no county shall be divided in the formation of such districts. "The Board of Apportionment" hereby created shall, from time to time, divide the state into convenient senatorial districts in such manner as that the Senate shall be based upon the inhabitants of the state, each senator representing, as nearly as practicable, an equal number thereof; each district shall have at least one senator. [As amended by Const. Amend. 23.]
Publisher's Notes. The provision of this section prohibiting the division of counties was held unconstitutional, under the U.S. Constitution, in Wells v. White, 274 Ark. 197, 623 S.W.2d 187 (1981), cert. denied, 456 U.S. 906, 102 S. Ct. 1753, 72 L. Ed. 2d 163 (1982).
An amendment to this section by Ark. Const. Amend. 45 was declared unconstitutional in Yancey v. Faubus, 238 F. Supp. 290 (E.D. Ark. 1965). As so amended, the section would have read: "The Senate shall consist of thirty-five members. Senatorial districts as now constituted and existing as heretofore directed by the Supreme Court of Arkansas in the case of Pickens v. Board of Apportionment, 220 Ark. 145, 246 S.W.2d 556, shall remain the same and the number of Senators from the districts shall not be changed."