I’ve just written this Jurisprudence essay for Slate. It begins:

In the Iowa Democratic caucuses last month, Democrats had no right to cast a secret ballot. In tonight’s Super Tuesday primary, Republican Party rules dictate that the state of Georgia will send more delegates (72) than Illinois (70) to the party’s presidential nominating convention. Illinois has a larger population than Georgia, but Georgia has more reliable Republican voters. In the Democratic Nevada caucuses, rural votes counted more than urban ones, and while Hillary Clinton got more popular votes in the state than Barack Obama, it appears Obama will capture 13 of Nevada’s Democratic delegates compared to Clinton’s 12. Orthodox Jews complained that they couldn’t vote in the Saturday morning Nevada caucuses. In California tonight, if neither Clinton nor Obama gets more than 62 percent of the vote in a congressional district, the two are likely to split the district-based delegates evenly. On the Republican side in the California primary, Romney and McCain are targeting the few Republican voters in heavily Democratic districts, because some of California’s Republican delegates are awarded based on the winner of each congressional district, not the statewide winner. And when the primaries are over, under the Democratic Party rules, “superdelegates” such as big-city mayors–who have not been chosen by voters–could hold the balance of power between Clinton and Obama in a brokered summer convention.
What gives? Didn’t the Supreme Court declare a “one person, one vote” principle back in the 1960s requiring the equal weighting of votes? And shouldn’t this render most of these party rules unconstitutional? The short answer is no. Although most of the deviations from “one person, one vote” would be unconstitutional if a state put them to work in the general election for president, party primaries and caucuses are different. Aside from some really egregious no-nos, such as weighting candidate delegate strength according to the race of their supporters, courts are likely to stay out of disputes over the rules for choosing the parties’ presidential nominees.