One person, one vote: SCOTUS to tell us what it means

[Skill and Chance]

Wow.  For a redistricting technicality, this has the potential to be the most partisan SCOTUS ruling in a long time.  It doesn't impact apportionment, right?  Just districting within states?  With VRA 5 gone, this could be an absolute disaster for minority voting rights.  Depending on just how bad it looks on that front, I could even see a Democratic president's DOJ going Andrew Jackson on this in 2021.

[Skill and Chance]

Hasn't it been residents from the beginning with the only exception being slaves, who were counted as 3/5ths?

For apportionment, yes.  For districting within states, it was whatever the legislature wanted.  The CA state senate was one-county-one-vote until the mid 1960's.  Random mountain counties could cancel out L.A.

It does seem fairest, to a first order, to have an equal number of votes or potential votes in each district.  The philosophical argument is very strong.  Although one could argue many non-citizens are potential voters through naturalization within the following decade.

[Skill and Chance]

If a person is 16 at the time of the census, he would then be essentially disenfranchised for the first 8 years after he becomes a voter. I'd be very surprised if the court doesn't shoot this case down.

It's easy enough to create a CVAP+citizens age 8-18 metric to resolve that, right?

[Skill and Chance]

If a person is 16 at the time of the census, he would then be essentially disenfranchised for the first 8 years after he becomes a voter. I'd be very surprised if the court doesn't shoot this case down.

It's easy enough to create a CVAP+citizens age 8-18 metric to resolve that, right?

The idea of a census is a snapshot in time, and not a projection into the future. The obverse of not counting kids too young to vote, is that we count old folks who will die during the ensuing 10 years, which one could claim is another form of "disenfranchisement" of those still living.

I'm unconvinced.  Post-1900, there's reasonable certainty that an 8 year old will live to be 18 and become an eligible voter.   We don't have any comparable level of confidence in whether a 70 year old today will or will not live until 2021 or 2031.

[Skill and Chance]

Good. I think it should apply to Electoral votes too. Eligible voters only should determine the population and the benefits thereof.  Entire Census Bureau should be shaken up.  State of TX should refuse to defend case.

Australia system though has one glaring difference - compulsory voting

I would strongly support that if the "compulsion" was a stiff reverse poll tax on non-voters.

[Skill and Chance]

Good. I think it should apply to Electoral votes too. Eligible voters only should determine the population and the benefits thereof.  Entire Census Bureau should be shaken up.  State of TX should refuse to defend case.

Australia system though has one glaring difference - compulsory voting

I would strongly support that if the "compulsion" was a stiff reverse poll tax on non-voters.

You realize this would kill the poor right?

I realize it would hit them disproportionately, but it reflects the reality that the poor are also hurt the most when they don't vote.  If Elon Musk chooses not to vote, there's still a million other ways he can massively influence the political process.  If a citizen day laborer chooses not to vote, how else will his/her voice ever be heard?  If you can't make election day a national holiday, then make it explicitly worth a day of unpaid leave at the median income.  It's also very likely constitutional after NFIB v. Sebelius.

[Skill and Chance]

Switching to CVAP would be a bonanza for the Republican Party, you know. And even besides that it would be morally suspect: even if immigrants and children cannot yet vote, they are still full human beings deserving of consideration, and are still affected by this policies of those who do vote.

Counting minors and noncitizens for redistricting purposes does not give them a vote. It just gives more electoral power to the adult citizens who live near them, at the expense of those who live further away. While I agree that these categories deserve a voice, the solution is to expand the electorate in the ways you suggested, not to distort the principle of equal representation.

And I tend to ignore the partisan implications when discussing electoral regulations. I'm not going to scold Republicans for rigging the system just to condone it when Democrats do the same thing.

You make a very good point.  CVAP does feel philosophically right for assigning equal sized districts.  But there is also the fact that the US system privileges rural voters in presidential elections and privileges them to the extreme in senate elections.  The current districting rules produce one of the only urban advantages in our whole system.  So I question reforming it without reforming the senate and electoral college simultaneously.

[Skill and Chance]

Assuming this decision comes next winter, there wouldn't be sufficient time to redistrict until after the 2016 elections, right?  So any new maps would be negotiated and drawn by the 2017 state legislatures?

[Skill and Chance]

There is no way the court isn't going to rule in favor of this considering it has a Republican majority, so we can look forward to elections where it is almost impossible for Republicans to lose.  From what I'm reading, it would shift electoral votes mostly to Republican states.

It actually wouldn't be as partisan as it sounds at the electoral college level: http://themonkeycage.org/2013/03/21/what-if-the-supreme-court-eliminated-noncitizen-representation/

Within states, it would cause currently GOP districts to contract and currently Dem districts to expand in most places.  So it might actually help alleviate the Dem self-packing in some Northern and Eastern states as long as they have a say in the process.  It probably does make it possible to wipe out half of the Dem districts in Texas, though.  Also, even if it did end up hurting them severely at the outset,  Democrats would just change their platform to win more rural whites, not die out as a party.

This would be a CVAP 2012:

This is actually still 271D/267R:

And this is still 270D/268R:

[Skill and Chance]

Doing this for redistricting but NOT for apportionment, while consistent under the constitution, makes a total mockery of the principles here. Either non-citizens should count, or they don't. Otherwise this is handing states like Texas a huge tranche of seats based on its non-citizen population which won't count for legislators. This means that a citizen in a Republican district in Texas will have an unequal vote compared to a citizen in a Republican district in Kentucky or Ohio because the R districts in TX will have significantly fewer residents and voters.

Good insight actually. Voting age citizens who make up a smaller percent of a states's population would get more representation, than those in states where they make up a higher percentage, which discrepancy arguably traduces rather than effectuates the one person, one vote principle. That would be an excellent argument to put into a SCOTUS legal brief. That one resonates with lawyer-legal types methinks. I assume there is not much argument at all to abandon inter state apportionment based on voting age citizens, rather than population, but then I have not researched or read about that one. If so, that puts the argument to use, or even to be allowed to use, voting age citizens as what to count, in a vise from which it will be very difficult to escape I would think.

I suspect that they are probably just taking this case to require that all states use a persons standard, removing it from state discretion.  But there is an alternative consistent scenario in which they impose districting by CVAP next year, then use a follow up case in 2017/18 to rule that "persons" in the 14th Amendment = CVAP and change apportionment in time for 2020.  Would that be reasonable or unreasonable?

[Skill and Chance]

Doing this for redistricting but NOT for apportionment, while consistent under the constitution, makes a total mockery of the principles here. Either non-citizens should count, or they don't. Otherwise this is handing states like Texas a huge tranche of seats based on its non-citizen population which won't count for legislators. This means that a citizen in a Republican district in Texas will have an unequal vote compared to a citizen in a Republican district in Kentucky or Ohio because the R districts in TX will have significantly fewer residents and voters.

Good insight actually. Voting age citizens who make up a smaller percent of a states's population would get more representation, than those in states where they make up a higher percentage, which discrepancy arguably traduces rather than effectuates the one person, one vote principle. That would be an excellent argument to put into a SCOTUS legal brief. That one resonates with lawyer-legal types methinks. I assume there is not much argument at all to abandon inter state apportionment based on voting age citizens, rather than population, but then I have not researched or read about that one. If so, that puts the argument to use, or even to be allowed to use, voting age citizens as what to count, in a vise from which it will be very difficult to escape I would think.

The Texas case involves only elections for the Texas Senate.  There are a couple of reasons for that.

(a) The senate redistricting case was completed in 2013.  The congressional and house redistricting cases continue, and likely will do so for the rest of the decade.  If the lawsuit would have challenged all the districts, it would have been yanked into the morass in San Antonio and likely have been offhandedly dismissed.

(b) The Texas Constitution provides no requirement for senate districts other than that they be contiguous.  This is somewhat of an accident.  In 2006, there was an omnibus constitutional amendment that removed "archaic" or "obsolete" provisions from the constitution.  One of these said that senate districts could not divide counties, which violated OMOV.   But the constitution also said that senate districts should be based on "qualified voters".  This was also removed.

Before 2000, legislators were given the advice that they could use "qualified voters" if they could get a reasonable basis for measuring it.  The census deliberately avoids asking about citizenship because it would discourage participation, and it is pretty clear that "registered voters" is not a legal substitute for "qualified voters".  It may have been ignored, but it was not archaic or obsolete.

So the question before the court is whether the legislature may "choose" to use population if if violates equal protection, which is the basis for the legislative OMOV decisions.  Wesberry v Sanders was not decided on the basis of equal protection, but rather on what (the SCOTUS divined) Article 1 says about the election of representatives.

If the plaintiffs prevail in the current case, I'd guess that there would be cases about congressional districting.   Note that Justice Harlan in his dissent in Wesberry said that majority had swept the issue of population v. voters under the rug.

So even if the Court rules for the plaintiffs, e.g. CA would presumably still be able to choose to use the current system, but states other than Texas could still choose to change?