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posted by martyb on Thursday December 10 2015, @11:14AM   Printer-friendly
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?)


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @03:34PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @03:34PM (#274481)

    You have low political efficacy (look it up). The fact is that real power is more distributed in the USA than it ever has been in the last 120 years or more. People don't read newspapers anymore, they get their news from the Internet and TV - and the latter is rapidly declining in share as people cut their cable contracts.

    How much money did it take to launch Soylentnews? This site can be viewed worldwide, with decent bandwidth. Granted, this is (mostly) a tech site, but there are thousands of other sites that are more political and economic in focus.

  • (Score: 2) by Nollij on Friday December 11 2015, @04:46AM

    by Nollij (4559) on Friday December 11 2015, @04:46AM (#274809)

    I'm not sure your premise is valid.
    Even the peak of any newspaper in recent years was only about 2 million. [theawl.com] That's the peak for the last 20 years.
    "The O’Reilly Factor averaged 3.381 million viewers" [deadline.com] (per night)

    I couldn't find reliable numbers for web news, but I bet most people simply switched out the NY Times for nytimes.com, Fox News for foxnews.com, etc. Soylent augments, but doesn't replace traditional media. Unless you count the green site as traditional media. (They're less than a year younger than Fox, after all)