Editorials: ‘Equal representation’ should include non-citizens | Richard H. Pildes/The Washington Post

If states’ representation in Congress were tied to their number of eligible voters rather than their total population, Texas would have four fewer House representatives and California six. Both states have millions of non-citizen residents and a disproportionate share of people younger than 18. Fortunately for Texas and California, the principle of political equality written into the Constitution’s 14th Amendment expressly recognizes that a state’s representation in the House should be based on its total population, not the number of its eligible voters alone. “The fundamental principle of representative government is one of equal representation for equal numbers of people,” the Supreme Court has said. But is this “fundamental principle” somehow wrong when states design their own legislatures? In the “one person, one vote” case before the Supreme Court, two voters from Texas argue that it is.

Editorials: The Supreme Court should seize the chance to strike down voter discrimination | Nina Perales/The Washington Post

Texas has a long history of voting discrimination against racial minorities. As Supreme Court rulings invalidated the Texas white primaries in 1944, the poll tax in 1966 and Texas’s system of multi-member state House districts in 1973, Texas turned to redistricting to dilute minority voting strength. The federal Voting Rights Act is the bulwark against unfair redistricting in Texas. Nationwide, the Voting Rights Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of race and, for certain jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination (including Texas), until 2013 it required federal preapproval of voting-related changes. In every decade since the 1970s, courts or the U.S. Justice Department have relied on the Voting Rights Act to block one or more unjust statewide redistricting plans enacted in Texas.

National: A.C.L.U.’s Own Arguments May Work Against It in Voting Rights Case | The New York Times

The American Civil Liberties Union weighed in last month on this term’s big Supreme Court voting rights case, the one that will decide the meaning of “one person, one vote.” It took the position embraced by most liberals: that states should be allowed to count everybody in drawing election districts, including unauthorized immigrants, rather than only people eligible to vote. But the group seemed to take the opposite position in a pair of recent lawsuits it filed in Rhode Island and Florida, in which it objected to counting prisoners when drawing voting districts. Counting prisoners in one district, the lawsuits said, “dilutes the voting strength and political influence” of eligible voters in other districts. There may be good reasons for treating prisoners differently from other people who cannot vote. But it is also true that counting prisoners, often housed in rural areas, tends to amplify the power of Republican voters. Counting unauthorized immigrants, who often live in urban areas, generally helps Democrats.

National: This Supreme Court Case Could Upend The Way Democracy Works | Huffington Post

The Supreme Court this term could change how states meet the basic democratic goal of “one person, one vote.” Ironically, a victory for the conservative plaintiffs who brought the case may turn on a national survey that Republicans have tried to eliminate. In the Supreme Court case of Evenwel v. Abbott, the plaintiffs argue that the votes of eligible voters — like themselves — are unconstitutionally diluted because Texas counts non-voters when drawing its legislative districts. Specifically, Texas uses “total population” data, which include such non-voters as children, inmates, former felons who haven’t had their voting rights restored and non-citizen immigrants. The plaintiffs, backed by the activist nonprofit Project on Fair Representation, want the Supreme Court to rule that states must draw their legislative districts based instead on the number of voting-age citizens or registered voters. The likely outcome of that ruling would be to shift power away from cities — which tend to have more children, non-citizen immigrants and Democrats — and toward rural and suburban areas — which skew older, whiter, richer and Republican.

Editorials: The Biggest Questions Awaiting the Supreme Court | The New York Times

The court’s new term, which starts Monday, will jump right back into high-profile constitutional battles like voting rights, affirmative action and the death penalty, as well as a new attack on public-sector labor unions. And the justices may well agree to take up issues of abortion and contraception again, in cases that could further strip away reproductive rights. The decisions last term showed a court willing to take into account the effects of the law on individual lives. This term, the justices have many opportunities to show that same type of awareness. The legal principle of “one person, one vote” got its fullest expression in the 1964 case Reynolds v. Sims, which ruled that state legislative districts must contain roughly equal numbers of people. Before then, district populations varied widely, an intentional practice that gave more power to rural white voters than those in the more diverse cities. While the court has never defined who counts as a person, the vast majority of states count all people who live in a district, even if they are not eligible to vote.

New York: Evenwel Could Have Tremendous Impact on New York Senate & Assembly Districts | New York Election News

Today’s New York Times editorializes on how two Texas voters in the Evenwel case are challenging the use of overall population for redistricting. “They want to force the state to count only the number of voters in apportioning districts. This approach, besides being at odds with long-accepted practice, is both inflexible and impractical. The census, which provides the data that most states use, counts people, not voters,” The Times editorial continues, “the plaintiffs know that getting rid of a system that counts all people would hurt Democratic-leaning urban areas with large, noncitizen Latino populations, and would favor rural and conservative areas where more Republicans live. In other words, the suit is an effort to transfer political power from Democratic to Republican regions. The Supreme Court has never required that states follow this or any other specific method of apportionment, and there is no reason to start now.”

Washington: State adopts opposing stance from Yakima in redistricting case | Yakima Herald

Yakima and the state of Washington are on opposing sides in a U.S. Supreme Court case seeking to define “one person, one vote.” The state Attorney General’s Office has joined 20 other states in filing a friend-of-the-court brief opposing the plaintiffs in Evenwel v. Abbott, a Texas redistricting case that could in effect overturn Yakima’s new district-based council election system. Yakima previously filed a brief in support of the plaintiffs, who are seeking to require state legislative districts be drawn by eligible voter population and not total population, as is currently the practice in all 50 states. The brief filed by the 21 states in opposition to Evenwel says requiring states to redistrict based on eligible voters would disrupt their “long reliance on well-settled redistricting practices,” adding that states lack any “reliable, administrable method” to carry out such a process.

National: The Case That Could Bring Down ‘One Person, One Vote’ | J. Douglas Smith/The Atlantic

In 1960, a town of 38 residents in Vermont elected the same number of representatives—one—as Burlington, population 33,000. In Georgia, house districts contained between 1,876 and 185,422 constituents. In California, more than 6 million residents of Los Angeles County elected just one state senator, as did 14,294 inhabitants of three counties on the eastern slope of the Sierra. Legislative malapportionment produced staggering inequality in virtually every state in the union. It was to address this situation that the Supreme Court established “one person, one vote” as a bedrock of American democracy. Now, for the first time since that era, the “reapportionment revolution” is under threat. This fall, in Evenwel v. Abbott, the Court will weigh whether or not “one person, one vote” allows states to base apportionments on all persons living within a given district, or whether the phrase really means “one voter, one vote” and requires states to count only voters for the purposes of representation. A ruling in favor of the challengers, who claim the weight of their votes has been diluted because Texas counts all persons, threatens to undermine one of the great achievements of 20th-century American democracy.

Editorials: The new look at “one person, one vote,” made simple | Lyle Denniston/SCOTUSblog

In a rare meeting with reporters in early July 1968, Chief Justice Earl Warren answered readily when asked which of the Court’s decisions in his momentous years on the Supreme Court were most important. The series of rulings, he said, that created the constitutional idea of “one person, one vote.” That is a basic theory of democratic representation: no individual’s vote may be weighted more heavily than any other’s. Election districts, for Congress and state legislatures, must be drawn as close to equal in population as can practically be done. The clearest expression of that idea came in the 1964 decision in Reynolds v. Sims. Now, a half-century later, the Court has assigned itself the task of deciding — remarkably, for the first time — how to get to that goal. What, it will answer in one case, population measure should be used: total people in a district, total citizens, total citizens of voting age, total numbers of registered voters? And, in a second case, the Court will answer whether it violates the equality principle if districts are drawn in a way that favors one party’s candidates. Both cases involve cross-currents of political theory, and both have the potential to directly change election outcomes and the election fortunes of the two major political parties. There is considerable complexity here, so let’s try to make this simple.

Texas: In Voting Rights, Who’s a Person? | The Texas Tribune

When most people hear the phrase “one person, one vote,” they don’t stop to think about who counts as a person. The U.S. Supreme Court gets to answer that in a case — Evenwel v. Abbott — that started here in Texas. The plaintiffs contend their votes don’t count as much as those of voters in other state Senate districts because the districts are designed to have the same number of humans in them, not the same number of voters. It’s a simple idea, but changing who’s counted — the voters, instead of the humans — would wreck the country’s political maps, particularly in states like Texas where large numbers of people are not eligible to vote.

Editorials: The Mysterious Number of American Citizens | Nathaniel Persily/Politico

Many Americans believe that someone, somewhere in Washington, must be in charge of tracking who is and who isn’t a citizen of the United States. Apparently, so does the U.S. Supreme Court, which just accepted a voting rights case that turns on the government’s ability to count the number of citizens in each voting district. But despite all the talk these days about government and Big Data, the justices, like the rest of us, might be surprised to learn that the most basic information as to who is an American citizen cannot actually be found in any publicly available government data set — anywhere. The case, Evenwel v. Abbott, poses a question: whether the Constitution’s long-standing “one person, one vote” principle requires equal numbers of voters per district instead of equal numbers of people, as is current practice. Most commentary on the case has focused on its implications for political parties and racial groups. But focusing on the politics, or even on the merits of the constitutional argument, ultimately distracts from a much bigger problem: The data necessary to draw districts with equal numbers of eligible voters does not exist. We have no national citizen database that tells us how many citizens live in each district around the country.

Editorials: The Most Important Redistricting Case in 50 Years | Sean Trende/RealClearPolitics

In a pair of cases decided in 1964, the Supreme Court of the United States famously established the “one person, one vote” test, which held that all congressional districts must have the same number of people, as must all state legislative districts. The consequences of those decisions were both immediate and far-reaching. A wave of mid-decade redistricting swept the country, as virtually every congressional and legislative district had to be, at a minimum, tweaked to account for population discrepancies. Rural districts in particular lost representation, while the depopulation of urban centers helped usher in the rise of the suburbs in Congress. Last week, the Supreme Court shocked watchers by agreeing to hear a case that could have consequences of a similar magnitude. In 1966, in a follow-up to the Reynolds v. Sims decision, the court had held that states did not necessarily need to use persons as the basis for their representation schemes. Since then the court has at times been asked to adopt various different metrics. It generally resisted these entreaties, although Justice Clarence Thomas has, at times, urged the court to take up these cases.

Voting Blogs: The Supreme Court and the “Constituent” | More Soft Money Hard Law

The Supreme Court has effectively decided to consider the question of who qualifies as the constituent of a legislator, and, as Joey Fishkin has pointed out, it got into this question from a different perspective in its most recent campaign finance decision, McCutcheon. There the Court included in that category donors, including out-of-jurisdiction donors. Is it possible that this Court would conclude that a donor is a constituent but that for purposes of the constitutional question presented in Evenwel , a resident under the age of 18 or a noncitizen is not? Fishkin writes: “[W]ho counts as a constituent? That’s the question, long latent, that the Court has decided to decide in Evenwel.”

Editorials: ‘One person, one vote’ should stay that way | Los Angeles Times

Five decades after the Supreme Court ruled that legislative districts must be drawn on the basis of “one person, one vote,” the justices have agreed to consider a claim that representation should reflect the number of eligible voters in a district, not the overall population. They should reject such a radical interpretation, which would undermine the principle that legislators must be attentive to the needs of all of the people living in the areas they represent. That includes children and the noncitizens who in many parts of this country — including Southern California — form a significant and productive part of the population.

Editorials: Two Supreme Court cases threaten to unravel California election reforms | Contra Costa Times

For more than two decades, Californians have struggled to reform the state’s electoral process, to make it less partisan and public officials more responsive. After fits and starts beginning in 1990, state voters approved an independent redistricting commission, open primaries and term limits that now allow state legislators to serve up to 12 years. Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court could significantly undermine the reform effort with its review of two redistricting cases, one out of Arizona, the other out of Texas, and both with profound implications for California and the nation.

National: The ‘One Person, One Vote’ Case Relies On Statistics That Nobody Has | FiveThirtyEight

“One person, one vote” is a deceptively simple promise, but a Texas woman wants to clarify which persons count. On Tuesday the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Evenwel v. Abbott, a suit that challenges exactly who should be counted as a person when states draw their district boundaries in pursuit of proportional representation.The plaintiffs are challenging the usual method (counting total number of people living in a district) and are asking that states use the total number of eligible voters instead. The trouble is, we don’t have robust statistics on the number of eligible voters. If the Supreme Court were to set new standards for districting, we would need to overhaul the nation’s statistics and surveys.

Washington: Yakima to submit amicus brief in Supreme Court voting rights case | Yakima Herald

Yakima will file a legal brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of a case that could upend the city’s new elections system, but it narrowly voted against asking for a partial stay in the upcoming elections. The City Council on Wednesday unanimously asked its attorneys to submit a friend-of-the-court brief in Evenwel v. Abbott, a Texas case that seeks to define the “one person, one vote” principle. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court announced it would hear the case sometime in the next year.

National: Supreme Court Agrees to Settle Meaning of ‘One Person One Vote’ | New York Times

The Supreme Court agreed on Tuesday to hear a case that will answer a long-contested question about a bedrock principle of the American political system: the meaning of “one person one vote.” The court’s ruling, expected in 2016, could be immensely consequential. Should the court agree with the two Texas voters who brought the case, its ruling would shift political power from cities to rural areas, a move that would benefit Republicans. The court has never resolved whether voting districts should have the same number of people, or the same number of eligible voters. Counting all people amplifies the voting power of places with large numbers of residents who cannot vote legally, including immigrants who are here legally but are not citizens, illegal immigrants, children and prisoners. Those places tend to be urban and to vote Democratic.

Texas: Supreme Court to hear challenge to Texas redistricting plan | The Washington Post

Decades after the Supreme Court set “one person, one vote” as the standard states must meet in creating legislative districts that equitably distribute political power, the justices agreed Tuesday to decide exactly which persons should count. The court, in accepting a Texas case brought by a conservative advocacy group, will consider whether states and localities may continue to use a place’s total population as the basis or must make redistricting decisions based on the number of citizens who are eligible to vote. A shift from using total population would have an enormous impact in states with large immigrant populations because of the greater numbers of children and noncitizens. It would most likely transfer power from urban areas to more rural districts. The court will schedule the case for the new term that begins in October.