petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to grant ... - Election Law Blog

15First, the issue has increasingly become a nationalconcern. In the 1960s, when the Court first recognizedthe one-person, one-vote principle, Reynolds, 337 U.S.533, the United States “enforced restrictive immigrationpolicies and experienced relatively little in-migration andpermanent settlement by illegal immigrants,” RonaldGaddie et al., Seats, Votes, Citizens, and the One Person,One Vote Problem, 23 Stan. L. & Pol’y Rev. 431, 453(2012); see also Philip Martin, Immigration: Shapingand Reshaping America, Population Bulletin vol. 61, no.4 (Dec. 2006). Under then-prevailing circumstances, theCourt “might reasonably have expected that eliminatinggross population disparities would result in districtswithin each state having roughly equal numbers of citizenadults.” Gaddie, supra, 453.But that expectation is no longer reasonable. “[T]henumber of immigrants has increased dramatically, goingfrom 9.6 million in 1970 to 35.7 million in 2005.” BelindaI. Reyes, The Impact of U.S. Immigration Policy onMexican Unauthorized Immigration, 2007 U. Chi. LegalF. 131, 135 (2007). Moreover, these immigrants “are spreadmore broadly than in the past into states where relativelyfew had settled two decades ago … [such as] Georgia,North Carolina, and other southeastern states.” 5 As aresult, “some of the most under-represented districts priorto the 1960s have now become, in terms of their numbers ofvoters, among the most over-represented.” Gaddie, supra,435. “Today the ballots of some voters still have severaltimes the influence of the ballots cast in other parts of thesame state.” Id. at 435-36.5. Jeffrey S. Passel, A Portrait of Unauthorized Immigrantsin the United States, Pew Research Center, at 1-2 (Apr. 2009),available at http://www.pewhispanic.org/files/reports/107.pdf.