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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: 2) by soylentsandor on Thursday December 10 2015, @06:42PM

    by soylentsandor (309) on Thursday December 10 2015, @06:42PM (#274570)

    At least Foo had the majority of the votes. In 2000, we learned a person can become president even when his opponent gets half a million [uh.edu] more votes.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 11 2015, @06:27PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 11 2015, @06:27PM (#275082)

    That's because it's an indirect election, that is, you don't vote for the president, you vote for the people who then vote for the president.

    Imagine there are only three states, Astate, Bestate and Cestate, with the same number of people each, and each one voting for one elector. In Astate and Bestate, 52% of all voters vote for Dick Head, and 48% vote for John Doe. In Cestate, 100% of the voters vote for John Doe. Thus Astate and Bestate get a Dick Head elector, while Cestate gets a John Do elector. Since the Electoral College has now a 2/3 majority for Dick Head, Dick Head gets president. However if you look at the voters, Dick Head got 34% of all votes, while John Doe got 66% of all votes. In other words, John Doe got almost twice as many votes as Dick Head, but Dick Head became president.