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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) by fritsd on Thursday December 10 2015, @03:09PM
I found your post flame-bait-y but I'd like to respond to your issue with kids voting:
I don't understand the problem here: the government knows the age and home address of everyone in town, and only the kids parents and (great-...) grandparents get sent a personal voting pass, if they're citizens registered as living in that town.
How can the kids vote?? If they show up with a faked voting pass they get thrown in jail (possibly their parents, instead).
(Obviously I have misunderstood something about this whole article.)
And about your labor camps: that sounds a bit like old-fashioned capitalist industry before social-democracy: like "Batadorp" [wikipedia.org] in the Netherlands.
The "town" gates are usually closed, and the employees/inmates have to do their shopping in the company shop at company prices. Complaints means you're fired.
It's all clean and neat and hygienic, but don't step over the line, slave! Remember the difference between lords and serfs.
That was 1924, ethanol-fueled, I don't think people would like to return to those times?
PS if the whole world *were* allowed to vote in the USA election, I think they wouldn't vote all for the Democrats. Maybe 50-50 between the Democrats and the Green Party :-)
If I plot the center point of the BRICS on this special Inglehart Values Map [wikipedia.org], the world votes like Bosnia.
Social Democrats, who'd have thunk?
I read it's called an "Overton window" [wikipedia.org]: what do you consider normal in your society's politics?