The Supreme Court agreed on Tuesday, May 26 to decide on whether state legislative districts must have roughly equal numbers of legal voters rather than overall populations. The challenge, brought by conservatives to Texas state Senate redistricting maps, argues that they violate the Constitution’s guarantee of “one person-one vote.”
In states such as Texas, Arizona and California, where the number of undocumented immigrants varies from one district to the next, drawing districts based on total population means that voters in one district will have less clout than those in the next.
In Evenwel v. Abbot, voters in Texas claim their ballots carry less weight than those of voters whose state Senate districts include large numbers of undocumented immigrants, such as in California. While the Constitution is intended to protect the principle of one-person, one-vote, what remains unclear is whether districts must be apportioned based on the number of residents or the number of legal voters.
The districts in Texas were initially imposed by court order ahead of the 2012 elections but were later adopted by the Republican-led state legislature and signed into law by Governor Rick Perry in 2013.
Two Texas voters Sue Evenwel and Edward Pfenninger claim the districts violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law, at odds with the “one person-one vote” principle.
Evenwel and Pfenninger are backed by the Project on Fair Representation, a conservative group with a history of challenging laws that take race and minority preference into account, including the use of affirmative action policies in college admissions.
The challengers say that in the districts where they live, which have a high proportion of people eligible to vote (584,000 citizens in Sue Evenwel’s mostly rural district), their votes have less weight than they would in neighboring urban districts with a low proportion of potential voters.
A federal district court in Texas ruled that the state Legislature’s use of total population could not be appealed. But as far back as 2001, at least one justice, Clarence Thomas, had said the issue should be reviewed by the Supreme Court.
The two voters challenging the state Senate maps claimed in their petition to the Supreme Court that in theory, the legislature could have put one voter in each of 30 Senate districts and all the state’s other voters into the 31st.
“The one-person, one-vote principle, by its terms, entitles voters to an equal vote,” Evenwel and Pfenninger said. “Unless the districting process no longer protects that right, the judgment below cannot stand.”
The challengers were backed by a half-dozen conservative and libertarian groups, an unusually large number for a case that had yet to be granted by the high court.
The state of Texas responded that the justices have never required legislative districts to be drawn based on the number of voters, rather than total population. “Multiple precedents from this court confirm that total population is a permissible apportionment base under the Equal Protection Clause,” it said.
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on the case in its next term, which starts in October and ends in June 2016. (With reports from USA Today, Reuters)
(www.asianjournal.com)
(LA Midweek May 27- June 3, 2015 Sec. A pg.5)
