Tag Archives: voting

Should be a No-Brainer

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As The Wall Street Journal‘s editors put it,

Get ready for what could be another landmark Supreme Court case. On Friday the Justices agreed to consider whether majority-minority Congressional districts drawn to comply with the Voting Rights Act are compatible with the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee.

The Court has asked the litigants in Louisiana v Callais to assess whether creation of a second majority-minority Congressional district violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments.

This is long overdue, as states are now caught in a vice. If they weigh race too heavily, they can run afoul of the Equal Protection Clause. But if they ignore race, they can be sued for violating Section 2. Louisiana’s House map is a prime example.

It is long overdue, from as far back as 1965 when the Civil Rights Act was first enacted. The relevant clause of the 14th Amendment is in its first Article:

No State shall…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The 15th Amendment is even more explicit:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Favoring one group of Americans over another—which especially in the zero sum game of voting favors one group at the direct expense of another—denies both groups equal protection of the laws by that favoring. Tailored to the right to vote, creating a voting district to favor one group on the basis of race or color explicitly abridges the voting rights of those citizens in that district who are not members of the favored race or color while simultaneously exaggerating the voting rights of those who are members.

This should be a no-brainer: Louisiana’s voting districts, drawn as they are on the basis of race, are unconstitutional, and the Voting Rights Act, which mandates such favoritism is itself unconstitutional. Any use of race, however seemingly slight, to create a district or any policy that considers race is unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court should listen to and heed its recently prior ruling that any consideration of race in college/university admissions is unconstitutional.

Gerrymandering

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It’s time to ride this horse again, this time due to a Wall Street Journal op-ed on racial gerrymandering, Texas, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which sought to balance minority access to electing government representatives with majority access (itself an unconstitutional unequal treatment law IMNSHO).

The op-ed centered on Texas’ move to redraw its current Federal House of Representative districts and “liberal” beefs that Texas’ current districts already disadvantage Hispanics is, here, irrelevant; it’s that unequal treatment that matters.

The second clause of the first Article of the 14th Amendment of our Constitution makes the matter crystalline.

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States…nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Gerrymandering on the basis of race is clearly unconstitutional, and that VRA should have been struck down long since—the latest opportunity having come when the Supreme Court released the Southern States from government oversight regarding their voting laws. Beyond that, one of the central privileges of a citizen of the United States is the ability to vote in an election (in this post, a national election) and have his vote count as much—neither more nor less—than the vote of any other citizen of the United States.

The concept—equal protection of the laws—extends easily to political parties: gerrymandering on the basis of political party also plainly denies us average Americans our equal treatment by limiting the value of our votes in some districts and artificially increasing the value of our votes in other districts solely on the basis of political stance.

The clear, constitutional, equal treatment solution to this is to draw our Congressional districts without regard to political belief, race, or any other criterion other than our status as American citizens (and citizens of the State in which we reside, as the first clause of that Article specifies), but strictly within (or as practice has overcome the explicitly stated requirement) within the spirit of equal population requirement stated in Article I, Section 2 of our Constitution:

The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand….

Thus: beginning with the geographic center of the State, draw the districts as squares, with the only deviation from a straight line being at a State’s boundary with an adjacent State. Otherwise, the number of districts must equal the apportionment of Representatives the State’s total population allows, and each of the districts must be geographically sized so that each of the districts has substantially equal populations of citizens.

We’re all Americans, and so we’re all equal under law. Race, political position—religion, etc—are wholly irrelevant to this.

Gore Both Oxes

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In Matthew Mimnaugh’s (ex-Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chief Counsel, among other such positions) Wall Street Journal op-ed, he decried the Republican Party’s lack of success, apparently due to lack of effort, in gerrymandering Red States compared to the Progressive-Democratic Party’s success at gerrymandering Blue States to gain Federal House of Representatives seats. After all, he noted,

In 2000, the House GOP earned its thin majority of 221 while outpolling Dick Gephardt’s Democrats nationwide by less than 0.05 percentage point. In 2024, despite a nearly 4-point popular-vote advantage, Speaker Mike Johnson has a majority of only 220.

Mimnaugh’s solution is for Republicans to become better gerrymanderers. Gerrymandering, he noted, is a tradition almost as old as our republic. It’s also, it seems to this average American denizen of flyover country, unconstitutional, for all its long-standing nature. Here’s Art I, Sect 2, of our Constitution on the matter of Congressional representation:

The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative….

There’s nothing in there about divvying up that sectioning in order to favor this or that party—or this or that race, come to that. It’s certainly the case that standing on ceremony and insisting on a maximum constituency of 30,000 per Representative, which with a national population of 340 million would result in a House of some 11,333 Representatives, would be politically and practically…impractical.

The gerrymandering bit, however, is easily corrected, and the correction better done than by competing gerrymander schemes every 10 years. The obvious solution is to divide each State by the number of Representatives to which it is apportioned every 10 years, thereby arriving at the number of Congressional districts into which the State would be divided. This is the current procedure. However, instead of drawing district boundaries explicitly to favor this or that party and this or that race, divide each State into substantially equally populated districts, and starting at the State’s geographic center, draw the districts as squares with the first four districts having one corner each anchored on that center. Then work in concentric “circles” around those four until the requisite numbers of districts are drawn.

For States with three Representatives, divide them into three substantially equally populated triangles anchored on that center with straight lines marking their mutual boundaries. For States with two representatives, divide each into two substantially equally populated districts with a straight line marking their mutual boundary. The reductionist case of one Representative is obvious.

In all cases, the only deviation from straight line district boundaries allowed would be at a State’s boundary with a neighboring State or neighboring nation, or in Hawaii’s case, the ocean shore line.

We are, after all, all Americans, all equal under law, and all voters, each with an equally valid and valued vote, without regard to party or race. Americans under law and as voters are as well party-blind and color-blind.

Misaimed Suit

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Recall, in the late runup to the Presidential election last month, the Des Moines Register published a poll by the once-respected pollster Ann Selzer that had Progressive-Democrat Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump by three percentage points, which represented a significant swing from a month prior poll that had Trump leading by a significant margin. Selzer’s early November poll was a definite outlier; all of the other polls of the time had Trump leading by a little.

Now President-elect Donald Trump (R) is thinking about suing the Register and Selzer for election interference in publishing that poll. This time, I side with the news outlet. The Register only published the poll. If there was election interference being attempted, it would have been by Selzer through her poll. Selzer is the only one who should be the target of any sort of election interference beef here.

Lawless Progressive-Democratic Party

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Recall that, in the vote-counting in Pennsylvania’s Dave McCormick (R)-Bob Casey (D) campaign for Senate, Progressive-Democrat Diane Ellis-Marseglia, Bucks County Commissioners Chairperson and member of the county’s Board of Elections had this on the matter of counting illegally cast ballots:

I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country[.]

She then proceeded to have her BoE count those improper ballots. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court then ruled unanimously on merit and 4-3 on procedure that those ballots could not, in fact, be counted because of their lack of proper dating. This was, in its essence, a repeat of its earlier ruling, some weeks prior, that those ballots could not be counted, and it’s that prior ruling which Ellis-Marseglia so contemptuously—and contemptibly—dismissed.

Now we have this from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Casey campaign: they’re suing

10 county Boards of Elections, demanding they count provisional ballots that were already rejected.

Because they agree with the Ellis-Marseglia Principle that court rulings be damned, they’re going to do what they want to do, regardless of law.

This is the bullet that most of us dodged a couple weeks ago and, hopefully, the good citizens of Pennsylvania will dodge this one, too.

It’s also a strong indication that we average Americans need to remain vigilant and active throughout the next several election cycles, too, so we can dodge the hail of bullets that will be coming from Party.