Leading Off:
●Redistricting: In a huge victory for voting rights advocates on Monday, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that states may count all residents, rather than just eligible voters, when drawing election districts, preserving a practice that states have almost uniformly used for 50 years. Plaintiffs in the case, Evenwel v. Abbott, had argued that map-makers should only take voters into account, which would have shifted power to rural areas and away from cities, where there are larger concentrations of non-citizens, children, prisoners, all of whom cannot vote. Such a move would have benefitted Republicans, largely at the expense of minorities, particularly Latinos.
The court, however, firmly rejected the plaintiffs' claims, which ran counter to half a century of jurisprudence on the concept of "one person, one vote" that requires districts to have (with only small exceptions) equal populations. What's more, as a practical matter, relying on eligible voters counts would have been almost impossible as such data does not exist in a consistent, dependable format, since the Census doesn't gather such information.
The justices also declined to say whether states may (rather than must) use eligible voters in the future, reserving that question for another day. As Rick Hasen explains, that serves as a "deterrent" to states that might have considered doing so after the next round of redistricting, because any attempt to draw new maps based on eligible voter counts would guarantee another round of litigation, one that might end up just as unfavorably for them Evenwel.
