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Laws Affecting the Additional Resources Redistricting Law 2010 U. S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, Voting Section |
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14th Amendment Redistricting became mandatory as a matter of federal law after the 1962 Supreme Court decision in Baker v. Carr,1 which interpreted the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause to require that political districts be equal in population so that one person’s vote would not weigh more than a another person’s vote who resides in separate a district with substantially more population than the first. For example, a voter in a political district with 100,000 residents will have 3 times more voting power to elect a representative than a voter in a district with 300,000 residents. The court’s ruling is known as the “one man, one vote principle.” Article 1, Sec 2 of the U.S. Constitution The census clause of the U.S. Constitution requires an actual enumeration of the country’s population on a decennial basis for purposes of congressional reapportionment of seats among the states. The Supreme Court held in 19992 that reapportionment must be carried out using the Census Bureau’s actual enumeration and not the statistically adjusted data that it also obtains. Whether or not this also applies to redistricting is still an open question but the Census Bureau and states have so far used the census actual enumeration data for redistricting purposes. 15th Amendment
While the Voting Rights Act was comprehensive legislation that provided a variety of protections, sections 2 and 5 of the Act took center stage beginning in the 1980’s, when the focus changed from ensuring poll access to redistricting and the effects gerrymandering had on minority voters. Section 2 has been primarily used to thwart certain techniques used to redistrict political boundaries that result in dilution of a minority population’s vote. Section 5 covered specific jurisdictions (mostly in the South) that had been found to be particularly pernicious in their efforts to deny voting rights to African-Americans and requires those jurisdictions to “pre-clear” any changes to their voting system either with the U.S. Department of Justice or the U.S. District Court in Washington, DC. Equal Population Subsequent to the Baker v. Carr decision requiring periodic redistricting to rebalance the population of political districts, two distinct court-imposed standards have arisen for congressional and legislative district plans. State legislative maps are given considerable leeway by the courts in terms of population equality. The Supreme Court reads the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to require legislative districts be substantially equal in population, however it has recognized that generally there are far more legislative districts in a given state than there are congressional districts and a strict population requirement would undermine other reasonable state objectives such as refraining from crossing local subdivision boundaries.3 As a result, a distinct line of Supreme Court cases have established a clear rule that redistricting plans that have an overall population variance between districts that do not exceed 10% are considered legal under the 14th Amendment unless a plaintiff can show that the deviations were not the result of a “legitimate” state interest. Congressional plans are differentiated from state legislative plans by the Supreme Court because the constitutional mandate that congressional districts be equal in population is explicitly laid out in Article 1. Sec. 2 of the Constitution. Thus, strict population equality is required among congressional districts in a given state.4 Very few justifications for even minor population deviations in congressional plans have been accepted by the court, and only on a case-by-case basis. Minority Vote Dilution (Section 2) While there are various techniques and policies that can lead to minority vote dilution, dilution of a minority population’s voting strength is often accomplished by spreading a compact minority population across several districts (cracking) or by intentionally drawing districts around minority populations to create a district with an exceedingly high concentration of minorities, thwarting the creation of an additional district with minority voting strength. (packing). Both techniques are used to marginalize the target population’s voting influence. There is a fine line however, between what constitutes impermissible dilution and what is the mere consequence of balancing population between districts or other traditional goals such as avoiding drawing boundaries that run through established towns and municipalities. In many ways, courts who adjudicate vote dilution claims seek to define this line. 1. Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186 (1962) 2. Dept. of Commerce v. U.S. House of Representatives, 525 U.S. 316 (1999) 3. Reynolds v. Simms, 377 U.S. 533, 578 (1964) 4. Mahan v. Howell, 410 U.S. 315, 322 (1973)
Lyndon Johnson and Rev. Martin Luther King at the
signing of Voting Rights Act of 1965
Each state is the master of its own redistricting map. Many state constitutions include language governing the process and what line drawers can and cannot do. While governing provisions vary from state to state, many state laws include language that requires maps to be drawn according to traditional redistricting principles such as contiguity, compactness, and limiting the crossing of established political subdivision boundaries. The U.S. constitutions’ requirements and the federal statutes and case law that flow from it however, are paramount in the formulation of any redistricting plan whether it be a small municipal district or a congressional plan. Here is a summary of the federal law affecting redistricting.
The 15th Amendment guaranteed citizens the right to vote and protected that right from being abridged on account of race or color, it also specifically authorized congress to enforce it by enacting legislation. Accordingly, congress enacted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 at the height of the civil rights movement to aggressively enforce the amendment in states and localities that continued to deny African-Americans the voting franchise using state and local laws.
News coverage of the Voting Rights Act Passage
Federal Case Law by Topic
