The Independent View: Supreme Court and the 'One Person, One Vote' Issue

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday will consider hearing Sue Evenwel, et al vs. Abbott, a constitutional challenge to how Texas created its state Senate districts. Evenwel merits the court's attention because it could reestablish electoral fairness in dozens of voting districts, not just in Texas but throughout the country.

In each of the 31 senate districts in Texas there are about 811,000 people, but there are wild disparities in the number of people per district who actually have the legal right to cast a ballot.

For example, in Sue Evenwel's mostly rural district, about 584,000 citizens are eligible to vote. In a neighboring urban district, only 372,000 citizens are eligible. As a result, voters in the urban district have more sway than in the rural district, their individual electoral preferences carry more weight.

This imbalance violates a bedrock constitutional principle: the one-person, one-vote tenet articulated by the Supreme Court in a series of cases, the first of which was Reynolds vs. Sims. In that 1964 decision, the justices put an end to Alabama's practice of allowing each county to have one senator in the Legislature. The old system had resulted in the voters of sparsely populated rural counties having disproportionately more senate representation than heavily populated urban counties.

Today, the disparity in voter equality mostly stems from a large and growing number of non-citizens living in Texas and elsewhere in the United States.

The Supreme Court has long held that population deviations between voting districts cannot be greater than 10%. The one exception to that rule is congressional districts, which must not have any population deviation. Yet, the court has never defined a critical variable in this equation: namely, what is the relevant "population"?

In other words, who is the "person" in one-person, one-vote?

Fifteen years ago, the Supreme Court declined to take up a case from Houston that would have addressed this issue. Justice Clarence Thomas, however, thought the court should hear it, writing that the court has never determined the relevant population that jurisdictions must equally distribute among their districts. And he noted that there is a split in the appellate circuits over who gets counted, and "as long as we sustain the one-person, one-vote principle, we have an obligation to explain to states and localities what it actually means." He was right.

The issue of voter equality is not going away, and it is long overdue for the court to act on this growing problem. Sue Evenwel and hundreds of thousands of other voters deserve nothing less.