Editorial: District Representation is the Priority

 In the 1960s, the Supreme Court established the “one person, one vote” doctrine that, to this day, has ruled the demarcation of electoral districts, determined by each state following the Census. The purpose is to get every district to contain roughly the same number of residents, regardless of their legal condition or age. This is the basis of a system of representation and it is now in danger of being modified by the Supreme Court, a move that would harm Latinos and urban areas.

 A lawsuit filed in Texas maintains that districts are currently too dissimilar regarding the number of voters they contain – if you count non-citizens, minors and convicts, among other categories, – even if the total population is comparable. The plaintiffs say that the power of the vote increases in districts where there are fewer voters against places we there are more.

 The complaint is being promoted by conservative organization Project on Fair Representation, whose mission is to lessen the influence of ethnic and racial minorities. The Texas group filed another lawsuit in the Supreme Court to eliminate affirmative action in state universities, and is also responsible for the case that diluted the protection against discrimination provided by the Voting Rights Act.

 This is an eminently political case. A victory for the plaintiffs could entail a major redistribution of districts suffering from significant population inequality, as a result of seeking parity. States such as California, Florida, Illinois and New York would be affected because many of their residents cannot vote. Meanwhile, states with a large rural Republican population – where only 19% of the country’s population lives – would see political benefits over the Democratic-leaning urban areas, where 81% of the population lives, according to the 2010 census.

 The problem of counting only voters is that there is no trustworthy way to do so. Even more important is protecting the right to representation of all members of a district, above subjective calculations claiming to protect individual voters over the rest. The Constitution states that everyone must be taken into account when electoral districts are defined, and it should continue to be that way.