Our view Read the fine print in the redistricting ruling
Sometimes Supreme Court de- cisions are unanimous because the issue is easy to decide, but sometimes it’s because the justices decide as narrowly as possible and keep everyone on board by steering around differences. That’s what Monday’s 8-0 ruling in a controversial Texas voting rights case feels like — it seems broad and definitive until you read the fine print.
On the surface at least, the ruling was a major victory for Democrats who worried the court would change the way state and municipal voting districts are drawn, shifting political clout from urban districts that often have large Latino populations to more rural, mostly white areas. The issue was whether voting districts should be drawn based on the population of eligible voters, or count everyone, voters or not.
The Constitution makes it clear that congressional districts are apportioned among the states by counting everyone, but it’s unclear whether that method applies to drawing the state and municipal districts at stake in this case. When the Supreme Court created its one-person-one-vote doctrine in the 1960s, it said voting districts should include equal numbers of people, but it never specified which “people” had to be counted.
A conservative legal group filed a challenge in Texas that in effect asked the court to define “people” to mean only voters. In its ruling in Evenwel v. Ab
bott on Monday, the court refused to do that and came down on the side of counting everybody. The opinion noted — correctly in our view — that the U.S. tradition of representative government means that politicians should represent everybody, not just those who can vote. People who can’t vote — children, immigrants who aren’t citizens, prisoners, certain ex-felons — all have a right to representation when government policies are being made and resources are being divided.
That would all be fine if the court had settled the issue, but it did not. While the justices refused to order states to count only voters when drawing dis- tricts, they stopped short of saying states couldn’t do that, signaling that the court could decide that issue if another case came up to pose it. That seems likely: The door is now wide open for Republican legislators to change state or local redistricting policy to include only voters, and send the question back to the court. Edward Blum, director of the conservative legal group that initiated this case, warned after the decision that the issue is “not going to go away.”
What’s standing in the way, for now, is tradition and practicality. With minor exceptions, all states and most political subdivisions have long drawn district lines that count everyone. Switching to counting only voters would be difficult because there’s currently no reliable way to measure eligible voters, who of course must be citizens. In its primary count of the population every decade, the Census doesn’t ask about citizenship.
As we said when Evenwel was argued in December, the court would do well to keep in mind something it said in 1964: “The fundamental principle of representative government in this country is one of equal representation for equal numbers of people.” Not equal numbers of property owners, or eligible voters, or some other subset.
Everyone.