[EL] The Supreme Court's Decision to Decide Whether It's One Person, One Vote or One Voter, One Vote

[David Ely]

Everyone seems to be focusing on citizenship, but there are large
differences in VAP as well, because some communities have far more children
than others. 

A CVAP standard is a double hit on Latino communities, since they tend to
have larger numbers of kids, most of whom are citizens. If the court ends up
requiring something other than total population for districting, will they
resurrect the 3/5ths rule for apportionment and apply it to kids and
non-citizens?  How would it make any sense to have one population base for
apportionment of representatives to states and a separate one for
apportionment of districts within a state. Or to put it differently, how
could it be possibly be unconstitutional to use an apportionment standard
within a state that is explicitly required by the constitution for
representative apportionment between the states.

 

How is this case different than the Irving Texas case the court declined to
hear a couple of years ago? 

 

How many different precedents would have to be ignored for the court to
require anything other than a total population standard? (Allowing another
standard is a different matter, but that is not at issue in this case).

 

The only confusing language is in the court cases requiring equal sized
districts referring to equal numbers of voters. The equal protection clause
itself is quite clear: "nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the
equal protection of the laws". 

 

I have to suspect that this is a case of the court conservatives lashing out
to protest the Same-Sex Marriage equal protection arguments.  

 

From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu
[mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of Michael
McDonald
Sent: Tuesday, May 26, 2015 12:17 PM
To: 'Election Law'
Subject: Re: [EL] The Supreme Court's Decision to Decide Whether It's One
Person, One Vote or One Voter, One Vote

 

It is worthwhile to note that the citizenship does not come from the
ten-year enumeration of the population. It comes from the American Community
Survey, which is a survey, albeit a large one. The CVAP estimates would
likely come from the five-year aggregation of single-year surveys, so for
2021, CVAP might be the percentage citizens among the voting-age population
from the 2015-2010 surveys, projected onto the 2020 enumeration. Further
complicating issues is that the past ACS surveys would not be immediately
weighted to the 2020 census, which will cause further estimation errors. The
five year estimates are at the block group level, so one will have
difficulty obtaining precise CVAP estimates for small districts (NH's lower
chamber leaps to mind).  If the court wants bright lines, it will not find
them in these data. I can easily imagine a war of experts over how to
construct citizenship estimates.

 

The ACS has recently been under attack from Republicans in Congress, so it
entirely possible that at a future point in time there will be no ACS and no
citizenship estimates from it. The constitution only requires a census of
the population, not the survey products that produce interesting statistics
like citizenship. So, it strikes me that the court can't reasonably require
citizen voting-age population as a basis for apportionment since there is no
requirement in the constitution that the federal government collect the
information.

 

============

Dr. Michael P. McDonald

Associate Professor

University of Florida

Department of Political Science

223 Anderson Hall

P.O. Box 117325

Gainesville, FL 32611

 

phone:   352-273-2371 (office)

e-mail:  dr.michael.p.mcdonald at gmail.com                

web:      <http://www.electproject.org/> www.ElectProject.org 

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