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from the non-voting-person-OR-non-person-voter dept.
The LA Times and just about every news outlet has a story about a Supreme Court case which could change how election districts are drawn up.
At issue before the court was the basic question of who gets counted when election districts are drawn: Is it all people, including children, prisoners and immigrants who are not eligible to vote? Or is it only adult citizens who are eligible voters?
The case centers around districts with heavy concentrations of people not eligible to vote (generally illegal aliens). These are counted by the census, and that district gets legislative representation based on their presence, even when there are fewer actual voters in those districts. The plaintiffs claim this give more weight to voters in such district, over an equal number of voters in other districts.
The challengers cited the example of two Texas state Senate districts, both of which have about 800,000 residents. One rural district in east Texas, where plaintiff Sue Evenwel resides, had about 574,000 citizens who are eligible to vote; the other district in the Rio Grande valley had only 372,000 people who are eligible to vote. The lawsuit in Evenwel vs. Abbott argues this is unconstitutional.
Do Soylentils see the allocation of election districts as a process to distribute legislative seats equally over the number of voters, or equally over the number of people (regardless of whether those people can vote or not)? (Or is this where we launch off on the usual discussions of a total redesign of the US Voting system to some totally different mathematical model?)
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @12:40PM
The reasoning may make sense, but I suspect this is more about justifying an excuse for some seriously biased gerrymandering rather than fairer legislative representation.
I work for the US Census Bureau, on the Decennial Census. It saddens me that politicians take our hard work and use it to gerrymander. We spend a lot of time trying to make sure we get good data (it's not perfect; counting 300,000,000 people is hard), and everyone I know at work wants whatever program they work on to be the best it can be.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Alfred on Thursday December 10 2015, @03:41PM
I call BS.
*start music*
One of these things is not like the Other, One of these things just doesn't belong...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @08:32PM
If you say "Government is the problem", get yourself elected, then (once inside government) do everything you can to wreck government, the problem is -not- government.
The problem is YOU.
-- gewg_