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

[Thomas J. Cares]

On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 1:28 PM, David Ely <ely at compass-demographics.com>
wrote:

> 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.


Is that a reply to my proposition? Because, if you divided, say, the State
of California into 8 districts (perhaps with 10 representatives, elected
through single transferable voting, for the Assembly), you can have very
nice compact districts, which match on both. California's areas with low
voter proportions - downtown LA, east LA, etc, - tend not to be too far
from those with the very highest ratios - West Hollywood, Malibu, Santa
Monica. You can put them together just fine. The single transferable vote
will proportion representation to voters just fine.

We're just not a creative enough of a society. Maybe we should do that but
also let parents cast votes for their children (which has been proposed),
but I digress. I mean there's a fundamental issue of whom we consider to be
members of society, and whom we consider to be guests. Are felons guests?
Are non-citizens guests? Are children guests, until they turn 18?

However, the imbalance of proportioning power but then not letting everyone
vote the power they were proportioned, does seem to create problems.

Neighbors of non-voters get super representation in the legislature, and
then often get spited by their regional neighbors in gubernatorial outcomes
and ballot propositions. That's not healthy. We probably don't have the
creative fortitude to solve that.


-Thomas Cares
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