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One Person One Vote? Or One Voter One Vote?

posted by martyb on Thursday December 10 2015, @11:14AM   
from the non-voting-person-OR-non-person-voter dept.

frojack writes:

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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Original Submission

• Re:3/5ths precedent Re:3/5ths precedent (Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Thursday December 10 2015, @08:39PM

  by curunir_wolf (4772) on Thursday December 10 2015, @08:39PM (#274623)

  That was superceded by the Fourteenth Amendment:

  But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age,* and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

  So it's not as simple as you seem to think. You have to look at that, and the 19th (which gave women the right to vote). That is, after the War of Northern Aggression created a stronger central government, representation counting changed to eligible voters, not simply "persons".

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  I am a crackpot

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• Re:3/5ths precedent (Score: 2) by Nollij on Friday December 11 2015, @04:32AM

  by Nollij (4559) on Friday December 11 2015, @04:32AM (#274805)

  representation counting changed to eligible voters, not simply "persons"

  Does that mean the next act of electioneering could be allowing convicted felons to vote in certain states?

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