The Conservatives Who Gutted the Voting Rights Act Are Now Challenging ‘One Person, One Vote’

[octoberlib]

33. One person , one vote has more to do with equal voting representation between urban and rural areas.

"One man, one vote" (or "one person, one vote&quot is a slogan that has been used in many parts of the world where campaigns have arisen for universal suffrage. During the 20th-century period of decolonisation and the struggles for national sovereignty, from the late 1940s onwards this phrase became widely used in less developed countries where majority populations were seeking to gain political power in proportion to their numbers.

The phrase was used in this form in an important legal ruling in the United States related to voting rights; applying the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution, the Supreme Court majority opinion in Reynolds v. Sims (1964) ruled that state legislatures needed to redistrict in order to have congressional districts with roughly equal represented populations. In addition, the court ruled that both houses of state legislatures needed to have representation based on districts containing roughly equal populations, with redistricting as needed after censuses.[1] Many urban areas of the United States had been long underrepresented in Congress and state legislatures due to the failure of the latter to redistrict according to population.

Some states redrew their U.S. House districts every ten years to reflect changes in population patterns; many did not. Some never redrew them, except when it was mandated by a change in the number of seats to which that state was entitled in the House of Representatives. In many states, this led to a skewing of influence for voters in some districts over those in others. For example, if the 2nd congressional district eventually had a population of 1.5 million, but the 3rd had only 500,000, then, in effect — since each district elected the same number of representatives — a voter in the 3rd district had three times the voting "power" of a 2nd-district voter. Alabama's state legislature resisted redistricting from 1910 to 1972 (when forced by federal court order.) As a result, rural residents retained a wildly disproportionate amount of power in a time when other areas of the state became urbanized and industrialized, attracting greater populations. Such urban areas were underrepresented in the state legislature and underserved; their residents had difficulty getting needed funding for infrastructure and services. They paid far more in taxes to the state than they received in benefits in relation to the population.[

In various reapportionment cases decided by the US Supreme Court in the 1960s, notably Wesberry v. Sanders, Reynolds v. Sims (1964), and Baker v. Carr, the court ruled that districts for the United States House of Representatives, and for the legislative districts of both houses of state legislatures, had to contain roughly equal populations, and required redistricting to meet this standard. The U.S. Senate was not affected by these rulings, as its makeup was explicitly established in the U.S. Constitution.

The cases concerning malapportionment ended the pattern of area-based representation in the U.S. House and state legislatures; these corrected imbalances between rural and urban populations. Eventually the rulings were extended over local (city) districts as well, as in Board of Estimate of City of New York v. Morris.[4]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_man,_one_vote