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

18regions of the country where this important legal issuerecurs most frequently.Third, the issue has real-world consequences forvoters who are forced into malapportioned districts bythe use of total population data. The one-person, onevoteprinciple has “significantly altered the flow of statetransfers to counties, diverting approximately $7 billionannually from formerly overrepresented to formerlyunderrepresented counties.” Steve Ansolabehere, EqualVotes, Equal Money: Court-Ordered Redistricting andthe Distribution of Public Expenditures in the AmericanStates, 96 Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 767, 767 (2002); see alsoMatthew D. McCubbins, Congress, the Courts, and PublicPolicy: Consequences of the One Man, One Vote Rule, 32Am. J. of Pol. Sci. 388 (1988) (discussing “the reallocation offederal policy benefits from rural to nonrural Americans”that occurred as a result of the Court’s one-person, onevotedecisions). Nearly fifty years after having entered“into [the] political thickets” of redistricting, Reynolds,377 U.S. at 566, the Court should now resolve this issuegiven the detrimental impact its silence is having on thelives of millions of voters burdened by the equalization ofdistricts without consideration of voter population.Last, the Court should decide this issue given thetension it creates between the one-person, one-voteprinciple and Section 2 of the VRA. As noted above, toprevail in a Section 2 vote dilution case, a minority group“must be able to demonstrate that it is sufficiently largeand geographically compact to constitute a majorityin a single-member district.” Gingles, 478 U.S. at 50.This showing is necessary under Section 2 because“[u]nless minority voters possess the potential to electrepresentatives in the absence of the challenged structure