Most people are familiar with the term “one person, one vote.” But what exactly does it mean? Probably the most common understanding is that it requires each voting district to have the same number of people in it. If I live in a town with 10,000 people in it and you live in a town with 100,000, and each town has one representative in the state house, my vote is much more powerful than yours. The concept seems fair and logical enough.
But let’s say we both live in towns with the same total number of people. But in my town half of the people aren’t citizens while in yours everyone is a citizen? Should my town still get to vote for one representative just as yours does? Should non-citizens be counted just as citizens? That is a critical question that has just been taken up by the Supreme Court in a case out of Texas called Evenwel v. Abbott.
The answer seems obvious from the very concept “one person, one vote.” Every citizen gets one vote, not two or one-half. The Supreme Court seems to have made this clear decades ago when it stated in the Hadley case from 1970 that voting districts should be set up “on a basis that will ensure, as far as is practicable, that equal numbers of voters can vote proportionately for equal numbers of officials.” The lower court inEvenwel disagreed, though, and said that equal total population should get equal representation, regardless of how many actual citizen voters are in the district.
In many parts of the country, that’s the status quo. Texas used the total population of areas in order to draw legislative districts for state representatives after the 2010 census. But some areas of Texas have high proportions of the population who are not citizens. Based on the actual numbers, the result is that some districts in Texas have 1.5 times the number of actual voters than in others.
