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

[David Ely]

The only way to achieve equal voters and equal population is to combine areas with a high ratio of voters to population with other areas with low ratios of voters to population.  This would produce deliberately dilutive districts, making a bad situation worse.

 

 

 

From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu [mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of Andrew M. Grossman
Sent: Tuesday, May 26, 2015 1:01 PM
To: jon.roland at constitution.org
Cc: law-election at department-lists.uci.edu
Subject: Re: [EL] The Supreme Court's Decision to Decide Whether It's One Person, One Vote or One Voter, One Vote

 

Note that the Evenwel jurisdictional statement (at 10) describes three possible measures: Citizen Voting Age Population, Total Voter Registration, and Non-Suspense Voter Registration. The first, of course, would not run into problems regarding voter registration or the "political activism" of different groups. The complaint claims a constitutional right "to a vote of approximately equal weight to that of all other electors in the same state," and it may well be that any of those measures would satisfy that right.   

 

It may also be worth noting that the plaintiffs do not ask the Court to choose between equal voting weight and equal representation. The complaint alleges that Texas could achieve approximately equal voter weight "without departing from the goal of equalizing total population." 




--
Andrew Grossman

 

On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 3:49 PM, Jon Roland <jon.roland at constitution.org> wrote:

The problem for basing representation on voting population rather than resident population is measuring it. Turnout in the last election doesn't work, because that is a highly volatile subset of qualified voters. About the only measure that might work would be numbers registered to vote, but that number can change quickly from one election cycle to the next, and may include many no longer qualified as of the date the district lines are drawn, so then the issues become how to weed the lists and how to decide the cutoff date for the number. Census counts might not be strictly constitutional, but they are far more practical.

But it would provide an incentive to register more voters, which is not necessarily a good thing. Do we really want even more low-information voters?

Or we could go to the Australian system and register everyone qualified, and perhaps make voting mandatory. 

In any case, an expensive proposition.



-- Jon
 
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