If you could tailor your electorate, you could pretty much sew up the election.
That’s the essence of a case that made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court and in a unanimous vote Monday was soundly rejected.
In the suit, Evenwel v Abbott, plaintiffs argued that only registered voters should be considered in determining the scope of election districts.
Under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, however, legislative districts are apportioned by how many people live there, including, of course, minorities, immigrants and children, as determined by the U.S. Census.
The difference as to how the districts are drawn theoretically impacts what decisions are made.
If elected officials are accountable only to registered voters, then their priorities take on a more narrow, and increasingly conservative, focus. By and large, conservatives are better at registering to vote than the public as a whole.
The challenge to the Constitution’s “One person, one vote” law came from a conservative activist group called Project on Fair Representation, that called for the change in district makeup by voter registrations.
The argument was that in densely populated cities with large numbers of minorities, a voter can have a disproportionate impact because of the high number of people who don’t vote.
Conversely, in sparsely populated areas where voter registration is typically high, their voting power is diluted.
What the plaintiffs didn’t say, but was as obvious as the nose on your face, was that urban areas with diverse populations typically favor Democrats over Republicans.
If the plaintiffs had won, the outcome would have forced states to create more legislative districts representing rural and mostly white populations while diminishing the number of urban and racially diverse districts.
THE HIGH COURT said no, that not only should all the people of a region be counted, but also that elected officials should be accountable to those people.
— Susan Lynn
