Supreme Court to hear Texas districting case

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to hear a case about whether states must count only those who are eligible to vote, rather than the total population, when drawing electoral districts for their legislatures.

The case from Texas could be significant for states with large immigrant populations, including Latinos who are children or not citizens. The state bases its electoral districts on a count of the total population, including noncitizens and those who aren’t old enough to vote.

But those challenging that system argue that it violates the constitutional requirement of one person, one vote. They claim that taking account of total population can lead to vast differences in the number of voters in particular districts, along with corresponding differences in the power of those voters.

A ruling for the challengers would shift more power to rural areas and away from urban districts in which there are large populations of immigrants who are not eligible to vote because they are children or are not citizens. Latinos have been the fastest-growing segment of Texas’ population and Latino children, in particular, have outpaced those of other groups, according to census data.

The Project on Fair Representation is funding the lawsuit filed by two Texas residents. The group opposes racial and ethnic classifications and has been behind Supreme Court challenges to affirmative action and the federal Voting Rights Act.

The court’s 1964 ruling in Reynolds v. Sims established the one person, one vote principle and means that a state’s legislative districts must have roughly the same number of people. But the court has never determined whether the state must count everyone or just eligible voters – or have some leeway to choose.

The case highlights a mainly rural district northeast of Houston that has 584,000 eligible voters, while a neighboring urban district has 372,000 eligible voters.

The result is that voters in the urban district have more sway than their rural counterparts, said Edward Blum, president of the Project on Fair Representation.

Then-Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, signed the redistricting plan into law. The state urged the justices to reject the case because “multiple precedents from this court confirm that total population is a permissible” way to draw districts.

The case will be argued in the fall.