My how time flies. We’re in the final quarter of 2015 - which means that we are right around the halfway point of the census period. In all likelihood, when the numbers are collected at the end of the current decade and the task of redistricting is begun, West Virginia will lose one of its members in the US House of Representatives. Relative to other states, West Virginia’s population has stagnated. In fact, during the census period that ended in 2010, West Virginia became the first state ever to record more deaths than births. Without significant numbers of folks wanting to re-locate to our state, we will continue to lose ground with to other states with regard to population.

But there’s another factor that comes into play - and oddly enough, immigration, legal or otherwise plays a surprising role. When the voting districts are drawn they use total population not voter population. This has the potential to create anomalies. According to an organization called True the Vote, “Currently, the concept of ‘one-person, one-vote’ does not apply to all aspects of our election systems in America. Across the nation, legislative districts are drawn using total population figures from the U.S. Census. To put it plainly, your legislative district was drawn to account for voting-age citizens, noncitizens, minors, etc. You don’t have to be a statistician to see that spikes in non-voting cohorts can distort the redistricting process”.

True the Vote goes on to say that “States like California, Texas, Florida and New York currently enjoy large numbers of electors – thanks in part to noncitizens being accounted for”, adding that “Without casting a single ballot, noncitizens now play a role in electing any person president of the U.S”. 

Back in 2014 this conundrum motivated a couple of Texans to file a lawsuit. Its entitled Evenwel v. Abbott. Having wended its way through the legal system it is now on its way to the Supreme Court.

Writing on the scotusblog.com website, Stanford Law Professor Nathaniel Persily calls attention to what he calls “the Constitution’s big data problem”. Says Persily, “The plaintiffs in Evenwel v. Abbott deserve credit for highlighting an unappreciated feature of our system of representation and exposing a gap in the jurisprudence of one person, one vote”. However, he goes on to say that correcting that “gap” is impractical.

According to Persily, the argument is “academic” and possibly “dangerous and destabilizing for the redistricting process” because a “constitutional rule of redistricting based on citizenship or eligible voters presents insurmountable logistical difficulties”. Got that? An academic calling the argument “academic”. He goes on to say, “These difficulties are of constitutional import because no national database of citizenship exists at the level of granularity necessary to draw legislative districts that comply with one person, one vote”.  In other words, technology hasn’t progressed enough; we have no way of gathering the right data, so the heck with the constitutional principle of one person, one vote.

Professor Persily continues (Voter ID haters take note), “The inaccuracy of voter rolls, moreover, has been a continuing source of frustration for election administrators and should caution against using voter registration as a population base for redistricting. As the report of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, for which I served as Senior Research Director, detailed, roughly eight percent or sixteen million voter registration records are invalid or significantly inaccurate”.  He goes on to say that in some states, it’s as high as 15%. Got that? Voter rolls are grossly inaccurate. Yet there are some people who insist that voter ID laws are unnecessary.

The principle of “one person, one vote” is a core American principle. However, when compared to the voter of 1790, today’s voter has been diluted by more than 95%. The 1790 census put the population at around 3.5 million and there were 105 members of the House of Representatives. A ratio of 33,333 voter per representative. Today, according to Wikipedia, the United States has the second worst ratio in the world at 722,636 people for each member of the House. Only India’s is worse.

Ironically, the dilution of the impact of our vote is similar to the dilution that the dollar has experienced since the inception of the Federal Reserve in 1913. Today’s dollar buys less than a nickel did in 1929, the year of the great stock market crash that ushered in the Great Depression - also the year that congress passed legislation capping the House of Representatives at 435. At that time, a member of the house represented a little more than 100.000 people, a three-fold increase over 1790. George Washington originally vetoed the Apportionment Act of 1792, the first ever presidential veto, because it “allotted to eight of the States more than one for every thirty thousand”. In other words, he believed that a congressional district should be limited to no more than 30,000 people. We might have done well to add that to his precedent of setting presidential term limits.

Five years prior to the Apportionment Act of 1792, in 1787, the Three Fifths Compromise was arrived at. According to Wikipedia, “A compromise [was] reached between delegates from southern states and those from northern states during the 1787 United States Constitutional Convention. The debate was over whether, and if so, how, slaves would be counted when determining a state’s total population for legislative representation and taxing purposes. The issue was important, as this population number would then be used to determine the number of seats that the state would have in the United States House of Representatives for the next ten years”.

Today our vote has less than 1/20 the impact that a voter had in 1787 and less than half of the impact of what was attributed at that time to a slave. How’s that for perspective. No wonder everyday Americans tend to feel disconnected from their government. Sadly, however, we can’t even rely on today’s Supreme Court to uphold the constitution. I would be surprised if they would recognize the hallowed principle of “one man, one vote”. Even at today’s diluted values.