…headline is quite misleading. As I’ve explained at Slate, at stake in the Evenwel case is whether state legislative districts might have to be redrawn to take into account total numbers of (eligible or registered) voters, rather than total population. This could hurt Latino representation (and have other effects) within state legislatures. It is possible, but not necessarily certain, that such a ruling could be extended to districting of congress…

…int # 2 (that the logic of a decision in favor of the voter denominator in Evenwel logically could apply to congressional districts as well). It is a fair point, and I had forgotten about this language. Nonetheless, if indeed (as I think remains unlikely) the Supreme Court holds in Evenwel that one person, one principles in the equal protection clause require the use of total voters otherwise some voters’ votes are unconstitutionally diluted, it i…

In my Slate piece on the Supreme Court’s decision to hear Evenwel, which I wanted to title “Unsettling Precedents,” I argue that whether to use total population or total voters (or perhaps some other denominator) in redistricting to comply with one person, one vote rules is properly left to the states. (I use the piece to argue for the irony of conservatives pushing states to adopt only a single measure of one person, one vote, which not only goe…

…hat an odd coincidence: that was actually the original question in Reynolds v. Sims itself. But like so much in contemporary constitutional litigation in the era of John Roberts and Ed Blum, the Evenwel case comes at the law in a kind of funhouse-mirror reverse, aiming to destroy in Equal Protection’s name a substantial chunk of what that clause has built….

……will likely be an amicus brief by political scientists (probably supporting neither party) explaining how difficult and contentious it would be to put in practice a voters only measure of population for redistricting purposes….

…Mark Sherman reports for AP on the Evenwel case (though that same headline probably could have been written for a number of other cases)….

With the Supreme Court’s decision to hear Evenwel today on whether it is permissible to include non-voters (including non-citizens) in drawing legislative districts, it is worth remembering what the Supreme Court said about this in the 1966 case, Burns v. Richardson, which I had thought settled it as the state’s choice (my emphasis below): The dispute over use of distribution according to registered voters as a basis for Hawaiian apportionment ar…

…day, the US Supreme Court announced it will take up for argument next term Evenwel v. Abbott, a challenge to the constitutionality of the Texas Senate redistricting plan that was enacted into law in 2013.   Two Texas voters, Sue Evenwel and Ed Pfenninger, brought this lawsuit asserting that their senate districts were malapportioned because there are a significantly higher number of eligible voters in their districts than in many other districts….