The Conservatives Who Gutted the Voting Rights Act Are Now Challenging ‘One Person, One Vote’
Ari Berman on May 28, 2015 - 3:06 PM ET
Ed Blum, who brought the case that led to the gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, is now going after the historic principle of "one person, one vote." The Supreme Court decided on Tuesday to hear Evenwel v. Abbott, Blum's latest case, which challenges the drawing of State Senate districts in Texas. The obscure case could have major ramifications for political representation.
Blum first began attacking the Voting Rights Act after losing a Houston Congressional race to a black Democrat in 1992 and founded the Project on Fair Representation in 2005 to challenge the constitutionality of the VRA. The Evenwel case doesn't deal directly with the VRA, but on how districts should be calculated. Since the Supreme Court's 1964 Reynolds v. Sims decision, districts have been drawn based on the total population of an area. Blum instead wants lines to be drawn based only on eligible voters—excluding children, inmates, non-citizens, etc from counting toward representation.
If that happened, legislative districts would become older, whiter, more rural, and more conservative rather than younger, more diverse, more urban, and more liberal. "It would be a power shift almost perfectly calibrated to benefit the Republican party," explains University of Texas law professor Joey Fishkin. "The losers would be urban areas with lots of children and lots of racially diverse immigrants. The winners would be older, whiter, more suburban, and rural areas. It would be a power shift on a scale American redistricting law has not seen since the 1960s. While not nearly as dramatic as the original reapportionment revolution, it would require every map in every state to be redrawn, with the same general pattern of winners and losers."
Demographically, the gap between Republicans and Democrats is wider than it has ever been. "House Republicans are still 87 percent white male, compared to 43 percent of House Democrats - the widest gap we've ever seen," explains Dave Wasserman, House editor of The Cook Political Report. "In terms of composition of districts, the median GOP district is 76% white, while the median Dem district is 49% white—again, the widest gap we've ever seen. Overall, the median House district is 68% white, compared to 63% for the nation as a whole."
http://www.thenation.com/blog/208625/conservatives-who-gutted-voting-rights-act-are-now-challenging-one-person-one-vote
= new reply since forum marked as read
but not the whole country -- not yet, anyway.
Need to keep this kicked up!
in the morning to even try and get my head around that. Maybe that was the idea. So much for "keep it simple". 
On the other hand, "one kid, one vote" might mean a lot more school taxes and bond issues would pass.
"One man, one vote" (or "one person, one vote"
is a slogan that has been used in many parts of the world where campaigns have arisen for universal suffrage. During the 20th-century period of decolonisation and the struggles for national sovereignty, from the late 1940s onwards this phrase became widely used in less developed countries where majority populations were seeking to gain political power in proportion to their numbers.
The phrase was used in this form in an important legal ruling in the United States related to voting rights; applying the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution, the Supreme Court majority opinion in Reynolds v. Sims (1964) ruled that state legislatures needed to redistrict in order to have congressional districts with roughly equal represented populations. In addition, the court ruled that both houses of state legislatures needed to have representation based on districts containing roughly equal populations, with redistricting as needed after censuses.[1] Many urban areas of the United States had been long underrepresented in Congress and state legislatures due to the failure of the latter to redistrict according to population.
Some states redrew their U.S. House districts every ten years to reflect changes in population patterns; many did not. Some never redrew them, except when it was mandated by a change in the number of seats to which that state was entitled in the House of Representatives. In many states, this led to a skewing of influence for voters in some districts over those in others. For example, if the 2nd congressional district eventually had a population of 1.5 million, but the 3rd had only 500,000, then, in effect — since each district elected the same number of representatives — a voter in the 3rd district had three times the voting "power" of a 2nd-district voter. Alabama's state legislature resisted redistricting from 1910 to 1972 (when forced by federal court order.) As a result, rural residents retained a wildly disproportionate amount of power in a time when other areas of the state became urbanized and industrialized, attracting greater populations. Such urban areas were underrepresented in the state legislature and underserved; their residents had difficulty getting needed funding for infrastructure and services. They paid far more in taxes to the state than they received in benefits in relation to the population.[
In various reapportionment cases decided by the US Supreme Court in the 1960s, notably Wesberry v. Sanders, Reynolds v. Sims (1964), and Baker v. Carr, the court ruled that districts for the United States House of Representatives, and for the legislative districts of both houses of state legislatures, had to contain roughly equal populations, and required redistricting to meet this standard. The U.S. Senate was not affected by these rulings, as its makeup was explicitly established in the U.S. Constitution.
The cases concerning malapportionment ended the pattern of area-based representation in the U.S. House and state legislatures; these corrected imbalances between rural and urban populations. Eventually the rulings were extended over local (city) districts as well, as in Board of Estimate of City of New York v. Morris.[4]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_man,_one_vote
