Twenty-four hours after giving constitutional backing for Arizona’s use of an independent commission to draw new election district maps for its members of Congress, the Supreme Court on Tuesday took on a case complaining that the same state agency wrongly used race and partisanship in crafting state legislative district boundaries.
The new election law case, Harris v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, was apparently held inactive on the Court’s docket until it ruled on a claim by the state legislature that it was unconstitutional to hand the congressional redistricting task to an independent agency not elected by the people.
The Court ordered a review of how the commission handled the fashioning of state legislative election maps in the wake of the 2010 Census.
A group of Arizona voters raised a number of issues in the new case: that the 2012 state legislative maps violated the “one person, one vote” requirement of population equality among districts because Republican voters were packed into districts to enhance minority voter strength in other districts, that this treatment of Republican voters used partisan factors illegally, and that the commission illegally sought to create districts dominated by Hispanics to enhance their voting power.
These uses of race and partisanship, the new appeal argued, were done to try to enhance prospects that the U.S. Department of Justice would approve the new maps under the Voting Rights Act, at a time when Arizona had to get such clearance before implementing new election laws. That preclearance requirement has now been wiped out by the Supreme Court, the voters’ lawyers noted, so such factors can no longer be justified.
The Court has already agreed to rule at its next Term on a case that also tests the application of the one-person, one-vote principle. The issue in Evenwel v. Abbott is whether the process of redistricting should use population measured by voters in each district, or total population in each, in judging whether the equality of representation rule has been violated.
UPDATE
On July 2, 2015, the review of the case in the Court’s next Term will be confined to two issues, paraphrased as follows:
** Does the desire to give one party an election advantage justify sharp deviations from the principle of population equality among districts, in violation of the one-person, one-vote principle?
** Does the desire to gain approval by the U.S. Department of Justice Department for new redistricting maps justify such deviations in population equality, especially since Department approval is no longer a requirement?
The case is likely to come up for a hearing in December or January.
NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker
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