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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: 4, Insightful) by fishybell on Thursday December 10 2015, @05:08PM
Exactly. The framers explicitly included all children and women who could not vote, and all slaves (or at least, 3/5ths of every slave) in the "respective Numbers." That not only implies, but is direct evidence that the constitution's final version (which was very much a compromise, which is often lost in today's discussions) explicitly included non-voters in the tally of how much representation a state would have.
The 3/5ths argument may be a very strong argument for the framers wanting to give representation to non-voters, but the women and children argument is a fully 2/5ths stronger argument, which is what I believe the grandparent post was trying to explain.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @06:44PM
I think that they should give representative count to all citizens, of any age, prisoner or not. BUT they should NOT count illegal immigrants.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @06:51PM
explicitly included slaves
FTFY, and it was the slavers that benefited from that particular clause. it doesn't help determine whether "free persons" should include non-voters.