Supreme Court Deals A Blow To Conservatives In Major Voting Rights Case

[applegrove]

Supreme Court Deals A Blow To Conservatives In Major Voting Rights Case

by Samantha Lachman at the Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/supreme-court-evenwel-v-abbott_us_57028dcce4b0daf53af02289?utm_hp_ref=politics

"SNIP..............


Democrats and voting rights advocates won a huge victory at the Supreme Court on Monday with a unanimous decision preserving the way state legislative districts are currently drawn.

In the case Evenwel v. Abbott, conservatives in Texas argued that the votes of eligible voters — like themselves — are unconstitutionally diluted because their state counts nonvoters when drawing its legislative districts. Specifically, Texas uses total population data, which includes children, inmates, disenfranchised ex-felons, noncitizen immigrants and others who are unable to vote.

The appellants, backed by the activist nonprofit Project on Fair Representation, argued the state should be prohibited from drawing districts in the manner that it currently does. They proposed that the state should instead be required to draw districts by considering the total number of eligible voters or registered voters in a given area. A three-judge panel of a district court in Texas ruled against them in 2014, so they took their case to the Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments in December.

A decision in the appellants’ favor would have shifted political power away from urban, younger, more Latino and therefore more Democratic-leaning areas toward rural, older, more white and therefore more Republican-leaning regions of the state. An analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice in December found that a ruling in favor of the appellants would upend every state’s electoral map, rendering them “presumptively unconstitutional” and in need of redrawing.




................SNIP"

[spanone]

1. K&R...