Editorials: One (mostly white, older) person, one vote | William H. Frey/The Washington Post

This month in Evenwel v. Abbott, the Supreme Court heard arguments for altering the long-standing principle of “one person, one vote” by substituting voting-age citizens for total population when drawing legislative districts within states. While much has been said about the implications of eliminating noncitizens from the population on which district lines are based, a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs in this case could have an even larger impact: shortchanging the interests of minority children and their families. That’s because nearly half of the nation’s under-18 population is made up of racial minorities, while 70 percent of voting-age citizens are white. The United States is undergoing a boom in demographic diversity, but it’s the younger population that’s being transformed first. Removing the racially diverse youth population from the apportionment calculation would intensify a divisive cultural generation gap that pervades politics and public attitudes in this country. Pew Research polling has shown that the mostly white older population is far less accepting of immigrant minorities and government support for social programs than is the increasingly minority younger population. The rise of immigrant-bashing presidential candidate Donald Trump as a hero among older white Republican primary voters represents an extreme version of the pushback against a demographically changing country.

Editorials: Michigan should do away with the straight-ticket option | Peter Lucido/Detroit Free Press

Of all the things that make our country great, nothing is more universally cherished than our right to vote. Americans choose their own destiny, and they exercise that choice through the democratic process. We are born and raised into thinking of our system as generally idyllic, or close to it. Considering how far we've come, it's no surprise that many people are resistant to change or hesitant to move in any direction out of fear that we are undermining a fundamental element of our American rights. However, who can vote and how are factors that have undergone both societal and constitutional change over the course of our nation's history. A brief look at our past will confirm that the willingness to revisit or redefine our voting process is generally for the better, when the goal is a more representative democracy. Michigan is one of only 10 states that still uses straight-ticket voting. Why should we settle for less?

Editorials: Trudeau must turf first-past-the-post system once and for all | Kelly Carmichael/National Observer

In the 2015 election, the Liberal Party committed to a platform they called "Make Every Vote Count." Now, they are poised to embark on a process that could make Canada fairer and more inclusive for all voters. The stakes couldn’t be higher for democracy. So what’s the problem we’re trying to fix? On October 19, over 9,000,000 voters (51.8 per cent) were unable to make their vote count and elect a representative to bring their voices to Ottawa. The country elected a majority Liberal government, but as usual did so with less than a majority of the vote (39.5 per cent). Most Liberals in Alberta and Saskatchewan, New Democrats and Conservatives in Toronto and Atlantic Canada— and Greens nearly everywhere— elected no representation to Parliament. That's a big problem. When your vote means nothing, it disempowers citizens and breeds disdain for democracy— and widespread apathy.

Editorials: Supporting Universal Voter Registration Should Be a Bipartisan Effort | Colin Curtis/Huffington Post

Regardless of where on the political spectrum you fall, we, as Americans who love and believe in democracy, can all agree that voting should be as easy as possible to do, right? Obviously I'm being sarcastic here because it doesn't take more than a moment of searching on the Internet for anyone to find an article about an elected official in a state like Kansas *cough* Kris Kobach *cough* doing everything they possibly can to make it harder for people to take part in the voting process. It also won't take anyone very long to find a few articles about the idea of automatic universal voter registration. As a native Kansan the idea of just automatically registering people to vote without making them submit a form and then jump through additional burdensome hoops seems as imaginary as a Hippogriff. However, Oregon and California have both done exactly that, and other states such as Maryland are looking to follow suit. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, implementing national automatic universal voter registration would add up to 50 million eligible voters to current voting rolls, save money, increase the accuracy of elections, and curb the potential for fraud and protect the integrity of our elections. While that sentence is likely to make Kris Kobach's head explode, it provides four good reasons as to why we should have a national universal automatic voter registration system but since Congress is... well, Congress, this is unlikely to ever happen and it provides four good reasons as to why states should do it themselves.

Editorials: How to Block Minority Representation, Yesterday and Today | David A. Graham/The Atlantic

The ongoing battle over voter rights—or, depending on your partisan persuasion, voter fraud—is on one level a struggle over whether it’s more important to ensure that the most people possible can vote, and that voting laws don’t have a disparate racial impact; or whether it’s more important to ensure the sanctity of the ballot box against errors, regardless of how that might inconvenience minorities, young people, or other groups. (One salient point here is that most restrictions—reducing early voting, closing polling locations, requiring specific photo ID—hurt minority turnout, while evidence of fraud is practically nonexistent.) On another level, though, it’s a battle about history: whether the restrictions being enacted in red states are part of a new struggle over civil rights, or whether the struggle for racial equality is completed and these news laws are totally different. Proponents of voter-ID laws understandably wish to distance themselves from their segregation-era predecessors, for both moral and political reasons. Officials in Shelby County v. Holder didn’t argue that racist voter suppression never happened; they argued that strenuous protections were no longer necessary. The Court agreed and struck down a requirement that certain jurisdictions submit any changes in voting laws to the Department of Justice to assess whether they were discriminatory.

Editorials: Poll workers needed | Cincinnati Enquirer

Hamilton County elections need your help. That’s the obvious takeaway from the county Board of Elections’ recent post-mortem of the snafu-filled Nov. 3 election. The board found that 84 percent of its polling stations had problems on Election Day. Among other issues, many poll workers struggled with the setup for electronic poll site equipment. Some local high school seniors assisting at the polls played hero by adroitly dealing with electronic issues. Clearly, Hamilton County needs more poll workers comfortable with troubleshooting a wi-fi router connection. It takes about 2,600 workers to operate the county’s polls on Election Day, and while the Board of Election has done well making sure polling locations are staffed, it needs workers who are fluent in using technology.

Editorials: Block the Vote | Jim Rutenberg/The New York Times

In September 2000, Oscar Del Toro of Monterrey, Mexico, arrived with his wife and three children at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston to start a new life in the United States. Del Toro, then 38, had spent his whole life in Mexico. His mother and father were naturalized American citizens who lived near Houston and had wanted to bring him to the United States with them. But because he was already an adult, with a wife and a child, he was subject to a long waiting period for a green card. He went on with his life in Mexico, building a business selling laser printers and buying a comfortable four-bedroom house. He had more or less forgotten all about the prospect of moving to the United States when, around Christmas in 1999, his mother told him she had a present for him: an Immigration and Naturalization Service letter inviting him and his family to apply for permanent residency.

Editorials: Political Campaigns Are Spying on You, and There Are No Rules to Stop Them | Brendan Sasso/National Journal

If In­ter­net com­pan­ies like Google or Face­book mis­lead users and vi­ol­ate their pri­vacy, they can find them­selves in trouble with fed­er­al reg­u­lat­ors. If gov­ern­ment agen­cies spy on people without the prop­er au­thor­iz­a­tion, they can get slapped down by a judge. Polit­ic­al cam­paigns, however, face no such hurdles when it comes to scrap­ing in­form­a­tion from private cit­izens. In­stead, they op­er­ate in a leg­al dead zone out­side the reach of fed­er­al reg­u­lat­ors. The Fed­er­al Trade Com­mis­sion reg­u­lates com­mer­cial pri­vacy is­sues, but has no jur­is­dic­tion over polit­ic­al cam­paigns. The Fed­er­al Elec­tion Com­mis­sion reg­u­lates cam­paigns, but has no pri­vacy reg­u­la­tions.
In re­cent years, cam­paigns have be­come in­creas­ingly ag­gress­ive in their ef­forts to build psy­cho­lo­gic­al pro­files on mil­lions of po­ten­tial voters. “There are no lim­its, and there should be,” said Jeff Chester, the ex­ec­ut­ive dir­ect­or of the Cen­ter for Di­git­al Demo­cracy, a pri­vacy ad­vocacy group. “Do you really want the Left or the Right to have a dossier about you to fig­ure out how to ma­nip­u­late you?”

Editorials: Time doesn’t heal wounds from Bush v. Gore | Stephen Carter/The Morning Call

Saturday marked the 15th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's controversial decision in Bush v. Gore, which put a stop to the recount in Florida, and thereby handed George W. Bush the 2000 presidential election. The case excited considerable scholarly argument, along with a partisan rancor that continues to this day. Looking back, however, it's hard to imagine an outcome that would have left the losing side satisfied — whichever side it happened to be. Let's remember the background. First, the "election night" count awarded the state to Republican George W. Bush by 1,784 votes over Democrat Al Gore. An automatic recount, required by state law because of the small margin, determined that Bush had won the state by 537 votes. On Nov. 26, the state's election authority certified that Bush had won. The Gore campaign protested that thousands of ballots — the so-called undervotes — had been rejected by the counting machines and should have been tabulated by hand. The Gore campaign sued, and the Florida Supreme Court, by a vote of 4-3, ordered a manual recount of all undervotes statewide. The Bush campaign then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments on Dec. 11 and, on Dec. 12, ordered the recount stopped, on equal protection grounds, because the state had no clear standard for determining voter intent in tabulating the undervotes.

Editorials: Bush v. Gore as Precedent in Ohio and Beyond | Richard Hasen/ACS

Almost from the moment in December 2000 that the Supreme Court decided its controversial opinion in Bush v. Gore ending the recount in Florida, there has been great debate about whether the case had any precedential value and, assuming it did, what precisely its equal protection principle stood for. Was it a one-day-only ticket? Is it a case about equality of procedures in the conduct of a jurisdiction-wide recount? Or does it require broader equal treatment of voters, so as to fulfill Bush v. Gore’s admonition against the government, by “arbitrary and disparate treatment, valu[ing] one person’s vote over that of another”? We may finally find out the case’s precedential value as soon as the 2016 elections. At the Supreme Court, Bush v. Gore has been a legal Voldemort, a case whose name a Court majority has dare not spoken since 2000. Only Justice Clarence Thomas has cited the case, in a dissenting opinion, and not speaking on its equal protection principles.

Editorials: Republicans’ coup de grace on voting rights? | Scott Lemieux/The Week

Last week the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case called Evenwel v. Abbott. The case involves an issue of increasing importance to American politics: congressional districting. It got to the Supreme Court because conservative litigators with a successful track record of fighting against the right to vote are trying to turn the logic of pro-voter rights decisions on their head. And it's very possible that they may succeed again. This most recent battle in the voting rights war involves two of the Warren Court's most important decisions. One of the tactics that state legislatures used to disenfranchise African-Americans was to draw district lines (or refuse to revise them) in ways that left minority voters massively underrepresented. In Alabama in 1964, for example, some counties included 40 times more people than others. In Baker v. Carr and Reynolds v. Sims, the Supreme Court held that such schemes were illegal. States were required to adhere to a "one person, one vote" standard when apportioning their legislatures. Combined with robust enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, these landmark cases helped to end Jim Crow disenfranchisement schemes.

Editorials: Bush vs. Gore’s ironic legal legacy | Jamie Raskin/Los Angeles Times

Fifteen years after Bush vs. Gore, 15 years after the Supreme Court intervened in a presidential election, a single sentence in the majority opinion remains one of the great constitutional brainteasers in our history. If we take the sentence at face value, it's nonsensical; if we ignore it, we might just be able to improve our dysfunctional election system, at least modestly. As we all know, the Supreme Court on Dec. 11, 2000, ordered an end to ballot-counting in Florida, effectively calling the election for the national popular vote loser, George W. Bush. And as most fair-minded legal experts agree, the rationale for leaving more than 100,000 ballots uncounted was convoluted — an extravagant and unprecedented twist on Equal Protection law.

Editorials: The public doesn’t support restrictive voter ID laws, but many new ones will be in force in 2016 | Herman Schwartz/Reuters

Defenders of photo ID laws regularly cite public opinion polls that show widespread support for their arguments. Yet these polls reveal no such support, and they prove nothing about this new restrictive legislation because the polls’ questions cover a far broader range of IDs than the actual laws accept as proof of identity. Many of the new laws do not accept a college student ID, for example, or an out-of-state driver’s license; but the polls drawing favorable responses encompass such IDs. As always, the devil is in the details. When Republicans won full control of 21 states in 2010, they promptly adopted measures to restrict and deter voting by minorities, the poor and the young, all key components of the Democratic base. One of the most effective measures requires voters to show one of a restricted set of photo IDs issued by either a state or federal government. Government studies have shown that these laws can prevent or deter significant numbers of poor and minority voters from voting. By 2015, 13 states had adopted what the National Conference of State Legislatures considers a “strict” voter photo ID law, including seven Southern states formerly subject to federal oversight under the Voting Rights Act.

Editorials: Bush v. Gore in 2000: Partisans still in charge | Richard Hasen/Orlando Sentinel

This month marks the 15th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's 2000 decision in Bush v. Gore, which ended a recount of ballots in Florida, and assured the election of Republican George W. Bush over Al Gore as our 43rd president. We can all breathe a sigh of relief that we haven't had another election meltdown with such stark national ramifications for the past decade and a half, but that's because we've been lucky, not smart. There were lots of lessons we could have learned from the Florida fiasco with its "hanging chad" punch-card ballots and its slew of lawsuits: that our voting technology was quite poor, and in a close election, the margin of error would exceed the margin of victory; that handing political partisans discretion to make choices over how to count and recount the votes can lead to both partisan decision making and lack of confidence by those on the losing side in the fairness of the process; and that in close elections, we can simply count on the loser in a razor-thin race to gracefully accept defeat and move on.

Editorials: The Court Takes Up One Person, One Vote | The New York Times

On its face, the constitutional doctrine of “one person one vote” seems about as clear as they come: no one’s vote should count more than anyone else’s. In practice this means all state legislative districts must contain roughly equal numbers of people. The court has never defined who counts as a “person,” but most states count all people living in the district, not only those eligible to vote. This issue was before the Supreme Court on Tuesday in a dangerous lawsuit from Texas that could upend the widely accepted method of drawing district lines that is based on the number of people, not voters. Through a series of Supreme Court rulings in the 1960s, the justices developed the one-person-one-vote doctrine in response to persistent abuses of the line-drawing process by white legislators, who diluted the political power of cities that have large populations of African-Americans and other minorities.

Editorials: Update Pennsylvania’s election system | ACLU/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Updates are a cornerstone of modern life. Computers and smartphones require regular software updates. When people experience significant life events — graduation, a new job, a move, getting married or having a child — one of the first things they do is update their social-media profiles. Just as we update our operating systems and social-media profiles, we should regularly update our public policies so that they meet the needs of today’s citizens. In the general election last month, fewer than a quarter of Pennsylvania’s registered voters turned out to vote. With few high-profile races on the ballot, this low turnout is not surprising. But, even in our most recent presidential election year, Pennsylvania ranked 29th among the 50 states in voter participation. It’s clear from these numbers that our system is overdue for an update.

Editorials: History Draws a Line on ‘One Man, One Vote’ | Noah Feldman/Bloomberg

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on whether states' drawing of legislative districts should be based on total population, as it is now, or voter population, as some conservatives want. The case, Evenwel v. Abbott, raises a fundamental question about who is represented in our democracy. But as so often happens, the oral argument took a turn in the direction of our history with a focus on the drafting of the Constitution. The key moment came when Justice Elena Kagan asked petitioner William Consovoy what would seem like devastating question: The Constitution requires counting total population when apportioning congressmen, so why should the states have to count voters rather than population?

Editorials: SCOTUS wrestles with redistricting cases | Josh Gerstein/Politico

The politically contentious topic of redistricting was front and center at the Supreme Court Tuesday, as the justices wrestled with a pair of cases challenging what factors states can and cannot consider as they draw lines. One case, out of Texas, looks at whether states should be required to take into account the number of voting-age citizens instead of or in addition to broader measures of population when setting up political boundaries. If the justices rule that the "one person, one vote" principle should be measured in part based on eligible voters, areas with high numbers of children or immigrants will likely see a loss of political power, while areas with fewer children and more U.S. citizens see a boost to their clout. Another case, out of Arizona, addresses whether political partisanship and concerns about qualifying for Justice Department approval under the Voting Rights Act are valid reasons to cause imbalances in the population of various districts.

Editorials: What if Going Viral Matters More Than Iowa? | Emma Roller/The New York Times

The candidates have posed next to a life-size butter cow in Des Moines, ridden motorcycles down the streets of Boone, bought 3,500 ears of sweet corn in Windsor Heights and given helicopter rides to state fair attendees. This is just what it means to run for president: ritual fun, meat-on-a-stick and all, in the great state of Iowa. “Pretty much every day in Iowa, you can go listen to somebody who wants to be president,” Cody Hoefert, the vice chairman of the Iowa Republican Party, said. But is the presidential race listening to Iowa? Well before Feb. 1, when Iowa voters head to their caucuses, the 2016 contest is already a national campaign. National polls, not early voting states, have dictated who gets stage time in the Republican debates. The candidates who did invest early in Iowa have faltered and, in some cases, left the race entirely. And some presidential hopefuls have found more success from a viral social media post than from a day out on the stump. (One notable exception may be Senator Ted Cruz, who dethroned Mr. Viral himself, Donald J. Trump, from his front-runner status in one Iowa state poll on Monday).

Editorials: Justices will get no satisfaction with a new ‘one person, one vote’ rule | Richard Hasen/Los Angeles Times

At the Supreme Court on Tuesday, the justices struggled over the meaning of the 1960s-era "one person, one vote" rule. Should Texas legislative districts contain an equal number of people — as they do now — or an equal number of eligible voters, as the plaintiffs in Evenwel vs. Abbott demand? Ultimately, the justices may have no choice but to heed some other words written in the 1960s: You can't always get what you want. Before the 1960s and the "reapportionment revolution," there were few federal constitutional constraints on how district lines were drawn. In practice, this meant that many states gave much greater voting power to rural areas (with much smaller populations) than urban areas. In California, for example, as J. Douglas Smith explained in his book "On Democracy's Doorstep," despite huge increases in the state's urban population, control of the Senate "remained in the hands of a shrinking rural and small-town minority."

Editorials: At the Supreme Court, Equal Representation Is in Danger | David Gans/New Republic

This morning, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in the case of Evenwel v. Abbott, a huge case about a fundamental question that goes to the very heart of our Constitution’s system of representative democracy. Who counts when states draw election districts—all the people or only voters? The case was initiated by activists who seek to empower certain voters at the expense of the entire population, which in Texas would tilt power toward more rural and, yes, conservative areas of the state. But the Constitution settles this question, and Evenwel should begin and end with the text and history of the Constitution. The Constitution guarantees equal representation for equal numbers of people. Our Constitution is based on the idea that all persons—whether or not they are voters—should be represented in our democracy. This is apparent in the Census Clause, which requires an “actual Enumeration” of all the people of the nation for purposes of federal representation, the disbursement of federal funds, and other ends. It is also contained in the Fourteenth Amendment, which requires “counting the whole number of persons in each State” and guarantees “equal protection of the laws” to any “person,” not merely voters. In these and other ways, the Constitution is clear: Ours is a representative democracy open to all. Indeed, Sue Evenwel’s argument that representation should be based only on the voting population was flatly rejected during the debates over the Fourteenth Amendment, when the amendment’s framers reaffirmed total population as the Constitution’s system of representation.

Editorials: Justices hard to read on Arizona redistricting plan | Amy Howe/SCOTUSblog

“Where’s the beef?” That was the question from Washington attorney Paul Smith, arguing at the Court today on behalf of the five-member independent commission charged with drawing new state legislative maps for Arizona. The Justices heard oral arguments in a challenge by several Arizona voters to the maps that the commission drew after the 2010 census; the voters allege that the commission violated the principle of “one person, one vote” when it intentionally put too many residents into Republican-leaning districts while putting too few into Democratic-leaning districts. The Court’s four more liberal Justices seemed inclined to agree with Smith, but some of the Court’s more conservative Justices were harder to read. Because a ruling in favor of the challengers could potentially affect redistricting maps around the country, both sides could be on tenterhooks waiting for the Court’s eventual decision.

Editorials: What Exactly Does “One Person, One Vote” Mean, Anyway? | Dahlia Lithwick/Slate

t is a complete accident of history that the Supreme Court hears a case about whether noncitizens are to be counted when states draw legislative districts on the day after Donald Trump suggested that it’s a good idea to prohibit all Muslims from entering the United States for a while. But the fact that the former idea gets as strong a reception at the high court as it does this morning really isn’t an accident, even as it’s rather surprising. The argument that looked like nothing more than a fanciful thought experiment born of a conservative think tank could well prevail this term. In the plainest sense, Evenwel v. Abbott simply asks the court to determine whether states—in this case Texas—should apportion legislative districts by counting the total population (as determined through the census) or the number of eligible voters. The plaintiffs, Sue Evenwel and Edward Pfenninger, contend that basing apportionment on persons rather than voters violates the line of 50-year-old cases, including Reynolds v. Sims, that established the principle of “one person, one vote” the court has located in the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.

Editorials: A Gift From Congress, to Congress | The New York Times

Congress is getting ready to give itself loads of extra campaign dollars again this holiday season. The catchall spending bill scheduled for a vote by Dec. 11 is what’s known in Washington as a “Christmas tree”: legislation festooned with amendments that are gifts to legislators and their home districts, or that create new, ideologically based policy that has little to do with the bill’s purpose, which is funding the government. Now the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and some House Republicans are reportedly planning to add four campaign finance riders to the $1.1 trillion bill’s already-groaning branches, hoping to help Republicans in elections next year. Mr. McConnell has personally put forward the rider that would expand his colleagues’ campaign coffers. It would allow the National Republican Senatorial Committee and its Democratic counterpart to escape restrictions on expenditures they make in coordination with an individual candidate.

Editorials: Does “one person, one vote” yield to partisan politics or the Voting Rights Act? | Amy Howe/SCOTUSblog

In 2000, Arizona voters amended the state’s constitution to give authority over redistricting to a five-member independent commission. Taking that authority away from the state legislature was supposed to take the politics out of redistricting – a key factor in a case before the Supreme Court last Term, in which the Justices rejected a challenge to the commission’s power to draw federal congressional districts. But a lawsuit now before the Court brought by a group of Arizona voters alleges that the commission, while supposedly non-partisan, is actually anything but. During the redistricting that followed the 2010 census, Wesley Harris and his fellow challengers contend, the commission deliberately put too many voters in sixteen Republican districts while putting too few in eleven Democratic districts. This means, Harris argues, that the votes of residents in the overpopulated districts effectively count less than the votes of their counterparts in the underpopulated districts – a violation of the constitutional principle of “one person, one vote.” The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Harris’s challenge on Tuesday, in a case that – depending on how broadly the Justices rule – could affect legislative maps far beyond Arizona.

Editorials: Up Next at the Supreme Court: A Challenge to Equality for All Americans | David H. Gans/New Republic

The country’s most dangerous legal mastermind returns to the Supreme Court this week. Ed Blum is not a lawyer. Instead, he recruits plaintiffs, hires counsel, and helps to finance litigation designed to move the law sharply to the right on issues of race and voting. Two years ago, Blum helped to bring two cases to the Supreme Court, Shelby County v. Holder, which sought to gut the Voting Rights Act, and Fisher v. University of Texas, which was designed to strike down affirmative action in college admissions. Now, with two cases from Texas, including a second trip to the Supreme Court for the Fisher case, he is hoping to rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment’s broad guarantee of equality, seeking to sharply limit affirmative action on college campuses and deny unnaturalized immigrants, children, and others equal representation in state legislatures. Blum’s campaign seeks to turn the Fourteenth Amendment into an obstacle to efforts to ensure real equality, denying the government the power to redress our nation’s long history of racial discrimination.

Editorials: Let Math Save Our Democracy | Sam Wang/The New York Times

Partisan gerrymandering is an offense to democracy. It creates districts that are skewed and uncompetitive, denying voters the ability to elect representatives who fairly reflect their views. But on Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear a case in which a small dose of math can help the justices root out these offenses more easily. Redistricting may seem unglamorous, but it comes up repeatedly before the court. Last month, the justices heard a case that could streamline the path by which they receive such complaints. In oral arguments, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. expressed his fear that his court could be flooded with complex redistricting cases. But he needn’t be concerned. Tuesday’s case gives the court a chance to adopt a simple statistical standard for fairness that cuts through the legal morass. In the United States legislative system, district maps must be redrawn every 10 years, after each census, a process that legislators manipulate to gain advantage.

Editorials: Voter Fatigue in New York | The New York Times

Even the most civic-minded New Yorkers may become exasperated next year when they are asked to vote in four separate elections. This extra burden on voters is yet another sign of the enduring dysfunction in Albany. New York State lawmakers created this problem because it’s easier on the politicians, even though it’s costly and harder on the voters. New York’s presidential primary is set for April 19. Congressional primaries are expected to be held on June 28, and state legislative primaries on Sept. 13, with the general election on Nov. 8. There is no reason the state primary can’t be held on the same day as the congressional primary, thus eliminating the extra election and saving the state $50 million.

Editorials: To purge voters, or not, in Ohio | Akron Beacon Journal

In a clash foreshadowing next year’s presidential election, Democrats in the Ohio House and voter activists now want big changes in how voter registration rolls are purged in the state. Experts consider registration the No. 1 factor in determining participation, and a bill unveiled last week by state Rep. Kathleen Clyde, a Kent Democrat, seeks to stop state officials from removing from the rolls voters who move within the state or who have been inactive. Her bill still would allow purging voters who move out of state and would leave intact the removal process for those who die or request to be removed.

Editorials: Evenwel and the Next Case | Daniel Tokaji/ACS

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear argument in Evenwel v. Abbott. The subject of the case is the meaning of the “one person, one vote” rule. The appellants argue that the Constitution requires equality of eligible voters among legislative districts. This argument is unlikely to carry the day – in fact, the appellants may well lose unanimously. Evenwel is still an important case, however, because what the Court says will affect how states draw state legislative districts after the next census and possibly even sooner. The hard question isn’t the disposition of Evenwel but rather its implications for the next case. The “one person, one vote” rule requires that legislative districts be drawn on the basis of population. Where single-member districts are used, each district must be of approximately equal population. In Reynolds v. Sims, the Supreme Court held that the “one person, one vote” rules applies to state legislative districting. This ended the states’ practice of using districts with very different populations – some with disparities over 40:1 – which generally advantaged rural areas at the expense of urban and suburban areas.