When you go to vote for state legislators, you don’t expect that some other voters in your state will have their votes weighed double yours, just because they happen to be neighbors with people who can’t vote. But that, in effect, is what Texas is trying to do.
When Texas draws its state legislative districts, it looks only to equalize the total population in each district, ignoring how many of those people are actually citizens of voting age. The result is a plan that would create one senate district where 74% of the residents can vote and another where only 47% can vote. Depending on where you live, you might be one of 383,000 people who get to choose a senator, or one of 611,000.
This is a blatant violation of the principle of “one person, one vote” (OPOV) that the Supreme Court established 50 years ago under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause: no matter where you live in your state, your vote should have the same weight. Nonetheless, a three-judge federal district court upheld the plan, following a flawed Fifth Circuit precedent holding that the Equal Protection Clause was ambiguous as to whether total population or voter population should be equalized.
But if a state really only has to care about total population, it could create districts of 10%, 5%, or even 1% eligible voters—and the tiny groups of voters in those districts would each be able to choose one senator all the same. Cato, joined by the Reason Foundation, has filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court arguing against this absurd result, focusing on rebuttals to two supposed justifications for allowing states to violate OPOV.
Read more at http://www.cato.org/blog/states-must-preserve-voter-equality
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