Cato: Supreme Court Leaves Meaning of “One-Person, One-Vote” Unclear

This morning, the unanimous Supreme Court ruled that Texas was constitutionally justified in drawing state electoral districts based on total population, even if this meant that great disparatives result among districts in numbers of voters. This was the case of Evenwel v. Abbott, in which Cato had filed a brief arguing that the plaintiff-voters’ proposed “citizen of voting age population” (CVAP) metric was a much better one to use when applying the “one-person, one-vote” standard.

While the eight-justice Court managed to achieve rare unanimity in an election-law case, at least in judgment, it did so only by declining to address the elephant in the voting booth. The Court failed to fill the gaping hole in its voting-rights jurisprudence: the question whether the venerable “one-person, one-vote” principle requires equalizing people or voters (or both) when crafting representational districts.

Read more at https://www.cato.org/blog/supreme-court-leaves-meaning-one-person-one-vote-unclear