Shouldn’t We Only Count Voters When Drawing Voting Districts?

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.

Via: Human Events

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Thousands of Troops May Not Get to Vote

Thousands of military personnel may not get to vote in the presidential election because ballots have been delayed in reaching military voters stationed overseas, according to Republican lawmakers angry over what they call a “serious failure” of the Dept. of Defense to safeguard the voting rights of the military.

Sen. John Cornyn, (R-TX) said thousands of military voters could be disenfranchised as a result of the DoD’s failure to modernize its system of getting ballots to troops.

“DoD’s failure to fix this longstanding problem means that the blank ballots of thousands of overseas service members, as well as some who have recently returned from overseas, could be currently trapped in an archaic and inefficient mail forwarding system,” Cornyn wrote in a letter to Sec. of Defense Leon Panetta. “These ballots are unlikely to reach these service members until after Election Day has passed.”

Via: Fox News Radio

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Dick Morris: Why The Polls Understate Romney Vote

Republicans are getting depressed under an avalanche of polling suggesting that an Obama victory is in the offing. They, in fact, suggest no such thing! Here’s why:

1. All of the polling out there uses some variant of the 2008 election turnout as its model for weighting respondents and this overstates the Democratic vote by a huge margin.

In English, this means that when you do a poll you ask people if they are likely to vote. But any telephone survey always has too few blacks, Latinos, and young people and too many elderly in its sample. That’s because some don’t have landlines or are rarely at home or don’t speak English well enough to be interviewed or don’t have time to talk. Elderly are overstated because they tend to be home and to have time. So you need to increase the weight given to interviews with young people, blacks and Latinos and count those with seniors a bit less.

Normally, this task is not difficult. Over the years, the black, Latino, young, and elderly proportion of the electorate has been fairly constant from election to election, except for a gradual increase in the Hispanic vote. You just need to look back at the last election to weight your polling numbers for this one.

Via: Dick Morris

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Black pastor uses lynching photo to help get out the vote

A pastor in Indiana has put up a sign that uses a historical image of the 1930 lynching of two black teenagers in an effort to recharge the black vote. Rev. Joy Thornton, the senior pastor of Greater St. Mark Missionary Baptist Church in Indianapolis, said he’s concerned that African-Americans have grown complacent about voting, and he wants to urge people to exercise the right he says was hard won, the Associated Press reported.

The sign, which has stood for nearly a week along the street in front of the church, shows, on one side, a white mob gathered around the teens to watch the lynching in Marion, Ind. Atop the photo is the word “VOTE!!!” Beneath it is the question: “Is this a reason to vote?” The other side of the sign shows an image of slaves in chains, with wording beneath it that reads, “Lest we forget.”

“[The sign] is to let people know there’s been a price paid for the privilege of voting,” Thornton, a black pastor of what he describes as a multiracial congregation, told Indianapolis' WISH TV. “Oftentimes people get complacent and don’t realize that people made a sacrifice, matter of fact, the ultimate sacrifice for such a privilege.”

Via: NBC News

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