Subject: Re: County officials and one-person, one-vote
From: Tom Round
Date: 10/24/2002, 3:58 PM
To: "Jim Gardner" <jgard@buffalo.edu>
CC: election law list <election-law_gl@majordomo.lls.edu>

>       any changes in county lines must be approved by popular vote

This hints at the reason for the distinction. Electoral districts for the same assembly elect representatives who sit as one body and may vote "against" one another. If I live in a district of 60,000 population that elects one representative, while the three neighbouring districts each have 20,000 population and also each elect one representative, I'd have every incentive to vote yes on a referendum proposition to split my district into three smaller districts, each also now electing one representative. If it passes, I've increased my political clout threefold. (Assuming that we can't split out district more than three ways as that would then make our new districts smaller than the smallest existing district.)

And it would be completely irrational for the voters of the three smaller districts to vote to become one single big district (if the rule is one seat per district). No reasonable voter would want that (at least not if their goal was maximising their own political power -- they would support it, though, if they valued equal voting power as a matter of principle, but then they'd want that principle applied uniformly to all districts, not limited to their own).

By contrast, it is quite rational, and not unknown, that voters in three 20,000-population counties might vote to merge into a single 60,000-population "super-county". There would be definite benefits, especially economies of scale. In fact if economy was your primary motivation, it may well make sense to replace three five-member county boards with a single seven- or nine-member board for the whole super-county. By contrast, if three 20,000-resident districts each currently elect five representatives to the state assembly, their voters would be acting against any possible interpretation of their own self-interest if they voted to merge into one 60,000-resident district with anything less than fifteen representatives in the assembly.

At 11:48 24-10-2002 -0400, you wrote:

Dear Friends:

Having just completed a close reading of all 50 state constitutions (don't try this at home), I was struck by the following question.

Virtually every state constitution establishes counties as basic units of local government, and also requires that counties elect certain officials, including a county legislature as well as many executive officials such as sheriffs, DAs, various clerks, registrars, etc.  Although much attention is paid in state constitutions to apportionment of state legislative districts, including their relationship to county lines, there is never any requirement that counties themselves be of substantially equal population.  This means that it often takes many fewer votes to elect a county commissioner, sheriff or DA in some counties than in others.  Moreover, most state constitutions entrench these disparities by providing that any changes in county lines must be approved by popular vote, and of course people in less populous counties can't have any great incentive to dilute their own votes by agreeing to take more people into the county.

In light of Reynolds, this seems like it ought to raise one-person, one-vote concerns, yet the practice seems never to have been thought to raise such a problem.  Yet why should the 14th amendment pierce the county system for purposes of equalizing the number of constituents for state senators, but not for county executives or county legislators?

This is not a completely arbitrary distinction, of course; one can always say that 1p1v applies only to the equalization of political influence within an authorized jurisdiction rather than across jurisdictions.  But that's an unsatisfying, tautological answer.  And it's not as though there's no state-level involvement here.  By establishing and entrenching county lines, and then mandating that  certain officials be elected within the jurisdictions so created, according to rules established at the state level, hasn't the state created inequality of political influence just as much as in the pre-Reynolds assembling of state senates on a county-by-county basis?  Or does acceptance of this practice merely show just how anomalous Reynolds was?

If anyone has any thoughts, or can direct me to any cases or articles dealing with this question, I would be grateful.  Gerry Neuman's otherwise fine piece about territorial discrimination doesn't get into this particular issue.

Best regards,

Jim

____________________________
James A. Gardner
State University of New York
University at Buffalo School of Law
Room 514, O'Brian Hall
Buffalo, NY 14260-1100
voice: 716-645-3607
fax: 716-645-2064
e-mail: jgard@buffalo.edu
www.law.buffalo.edu



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Dr Tom Round
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