The Supreme Court Misread Constitutional History Regarding “One Person, One Vote”

Two months ago, the Supreme Court ruled that states have leeway in determining how to draw their legislative districts, more specifically that they don’t have to equalize the number of voters per district to satisfy the constitutional principle of “one person, one vote.” The decision was really a “punt,” not resolving the tensions between “representational equality” and “voter equality”; it’ll take some future case after the next census to force the justices to face the issues left unresolved. 


Former Cato intern (and future legal associate) Tommy Berry and I have now published an essay in the Federalist Society Review explaining how the Court “shanked” that punt by misreading constitutional structure and application. Here’s a sample (footnotes omitted):

In Evenwel, the Court decided that it is acceptable for a state to ignore the distinction between voters and nonvoters when drawing legislative district lines. According to the Court, a state may declare that equality is simply providing representatives to equal groups of people, without distinction as to how many of those people will actually choose the representative. A state may use this constituent‐​focused view of equality because “[b]y ensuring that each representative is subject to requests and suggestions from the same number of constituents, total‐​population apportionment promotes equitable and effective representation.”


But ignoring the distinction between voters and nonvoters achieves a false picture of equality at the expense of producing far more serious inequalities. Rather than placing nonvoters and voters on anything approaching an equal political footing, it instead gives greater power to those voters who happen to live near more nonvoters, and less power to those who do not.


As we argued before the decision came down, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment recognized that granting such extra voting power runs the risk of harming the very nonvoters to whom it ostensibly grants representation. This recognition manifested itself in the enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Penalty Clause. In both ignoring that clause and oversimplifying the debates over the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court’s opinion paints an incomplete picture of constitutional history.

Read the whole thing. For more, see Tommy’s blogpost on our article, as well as our earlier criticism of Justice Ginsburg’s majority opinion for misreading the Federalist Papers.