Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp is closely watching Evenwel v. Abbott, a lawsuit argued this week in U.S. Supreme Court chambers. Its outcome, which will come by next June, could have a long-term effect of Georgia’s redistricting and the make-up of its General Assembly—especially since Democrat-controlled legislative seats tend to have larger numbers of non-citizens than do Republican-controlled districts.
Why is the non-citizen factor important? Instead of using the citizen voting age population to draw state Senate district boundaries with an equivalent population, the Texas legislature used total population— and that includes many people not eligible to vote, including illegal aliens. Challengers Sue Evenwel and Edward Pfenninger argue that this violates the “one person, one vote” guarantee by significantly diluting their votes compared to neighboring districts with large populations of illegal immigrants. (The high court has ruled previously that states are free to choose which population to use in drawing district lines, unless it would otherwise violate the Constitution.)
Hans von Spakovsky, formerly an Atlantan who once served on the Fulton County elections board, is now a senior legal fellow at the Washington-based Heritage Foundation. The following is his take on the case:
“Will Consovoy, a former Supreme Court law clerk, represented the challengers. He argued that the one-person, one-vote standard protects individual voters. Thus, states cannot draw districts that give some voters greater weight than others depending on where they live geographically.
“Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggested that the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey is not accurate enough to provide detailed information on non-citizens that can be used by states for redistricting. But Consovoy rebutted this claim, pointing out that Texas actually had citizens’ voting age population data available when it did its redistricting and that the data is used by the Justice Department in all of its Section 2 lawsuits under the Voting Rights Act.
“The State of Texas and the U.S. Solicitor General’s office both argued in defense of Texas’s districts. Texas Solicitor General Scott Keller argued that this was a states’ rights issue, and that it should be left up to the states to choose the population they use in redistricting. When asked by Chief Justice John Roberts why the U.S. Justice Department used American Community Survey data in its Voting Rights Act lawsuits if it was so inaccurate, Deputy U.S. Solicitor General Ian Gershengorn asserted that this data was just one of many factors considered by the Justice Department in its vote dilution lawsuits under the Voting Rights Act.”
Von Spakovsky observes that the justices’ questions this week did not really indicate how they will decide. But the “one person, one vote” argument appears compelling. With Georgia having one of the largest illegal immigrant, non-voting populations in the country (larger than Arizona, for example) a ruling on behalf of the challengers would help reinforce GOP dominance of the Peach State for perhaps two decades (unless most illegal aliens are amnestied in the future and allowed to vote). And legislative districts likely would be redrawn in other parts of the country with large non-citizen populations, with a noticeable shift toward Republicans.
