On Monday, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that states may count all residents when drawing election districts, even if not every person in a district is allowed to vote. That means that districts can all have the same number of people—even if half of one district is made up of immigrants who are not eligible to vote in the U.S., and another district has all registered voters. Same with areas that have a lot of children or convicted felons. In a district with many people who can’t vote, the power of the people who can vote in that district goes up, because there are fewer people voting overall. This “one person, one vote” standard is how it was before, so SCOTUS hasn’t actually changed anything. They’ve just stopped a change from taking place.
This is good for the Democratic party, as areas with a high concentration of people who can’t vote tend to be urban and Democratic-leaning, according to the The New York Times. However, if the vote had gone the other way and counted only eligible voters, the nation would have seen a shift towards the Republican party, as political power would shift to rural areas. Either way, the vote would end with one party benefiting more than the other.
As expected, this vote has sparked a lot of debate across the nation. Is it fair to give some voters more power because of where they live? Or is it important that these voters represent the voices of people who live in the U.S. and benefit from its policies, but can’t vote?
Even though the Supreme Court made an important clarification with this ruling, they didn’t specify whether or not states would be permitted to count their population in any way they chose. The ruling states that “all states use total population numbers when from the census when designing congressional and state-legislative districts.” Not a super specific sentence. Texas lawmakers were asking for the option to use different criteria when calculating population for the census, and this ruling won’t stop them from doing that—But as Reuters points out, the ruling will probaby make it harder for them to get other methods of counting passed legally.
Professor Richard L. Hansen at the University of California, Irvine, told the Times, “it is hard to stress enough what a victory this is for liberal supporters of voting rights.”
While the results of the ruling are stirring up a lot of debate and upset around the nation, the same would be true had the vote gone the other way. Politics in the U.S. is indelibly divided and not every ruling can please both parties. In this case, the victory is given to the Democrats and supporters of liberal voting rights.