one person-one vote

[Mortimer Sellers]

In reply to Sandy's two questions:

1.  The justification for the "one person-one vote" mantra is not so much
the perfect and permanent numerical equality of districts as it is to
prevent the purposive exclusion or deliberately dimished consideration of
any group of voters.  Population changes between census cycles are not
distributed in any politically consistent way, and are therefore
untroubling.

2.  At-large districts and too-frequent redistricting would undermine the
republican purposes of political community that support the
"one-person-one vote" standard, and should therefore be avoided, as they
violate both good policy and the intent of the framers.

              Tim

On Mon, 31 Dec 2001 15:42:40 -0600 Sanford Levinson
<SLevinson at MAIL.LAW.UTEXAS.EDU> wrote:

> In an article I am currently writing on what I term the "mantra" of "one
> person-one vote," I include the following footnote, following a sentence
> asserting that the equipopulation doctrine of Karcher v. Doggett only
> applies, as a practical matter, to the first election in the 10-year
> cycle between the census and consequent reapportionment:
>
>
> One of the odder features of the "one person-one vote" doctrine, however
> it is defined, is that it seemingly applies, as a practical matter, only
> in one election cycle out of the (usual) five in any ten-year period.
> That is, the practical dynamics of population growth and  mobility in the
> United States operate to assure that even mathematically identical
> districts (by whatever measure) in election 1 are almost certainly going
> to be different, often dramatically so, by the third or fourth election,
> perhaps even by the second one.  So, as a practical matter, the right of
> an individual to be in a congressional district with close to the
> identical population of every other district in the state operates for
> only one election.   For the other four elections in the typical cycle,
> it is presumably quite all right if the given voter in District 1 is in a
> larger district than some other voter in District 2.  Why this should be
> so, if we really believe that a truly important individual right is at
> stake, is not easily explained.  Although it is true that the
> Constitution mandates a census only every decade, it would be altogether
> feasible if courts (or an unusually zealous Congress determined to
> "enforce" Reynolds' mandate through exercise of its Section 5 powers)
> required require states to conduct their one population counts every two
> years (and to redraw district lines accordingly).   If the reader's
> intuition is that this would be at best inane, and perhaps out-and-out
> insane, then perhaps that should lead the reader to re-evaluate what may
> be his or her commitment to the mantra in the first place.
>
>
>
>
> I would appreciate some feedback on two points:
>
>
> a)  Do you think my basic intuition is sound?  Are there other examples
> of ostensible "remedies" for constitutional wrongs that we know have
> become inadequate over time but remain, nonetheless, in place because it
> would be too expensive to recalibrate the remedy?
>
>
> b)  Would Congress, after Boerne and Morrison, have Section 5 power to
> order states to make sure that <italic>every</italic> election could pass
> the "one person-one vote" mantra.  Would it be "commandeering" to order
> them to conduct a census themselves?  Could Congress simply say that
> elections would have to be at-large (as in Illinois' famous 1966
> election) in the absence of the state's coming up with an "accurate"
> count for the relevant election cycle?
>
>
> sandy

Prof. M.N.S. Sellers
Director, Center for International and Comparative Law
University of Baltimore School of Law
1420 North Charles St.
Baltimore, Maryland  21201-5779

telephone:410-837-4532
facsimile:410-837-4396