loan-arranger is formally correct. Apportionment of representatives to the states MUST be by the “whole number of persons” (with exceptions for non-taxed Indians and prisoners. That does not explicitly say that districts must also be by the whole number of persons. It certainly suggests strongly that “whole number of persons” is the correct metric for decisions regarding Representatives, but it doesn’t say so explicitly. Likewise, various SCOTUS decisions (notably Baker v Carr) rely on the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, which says that states may not “deny to any PERSONS within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws”, although Wesberry v Sanders talks about equal weight for “votes” (“as nearly as practicable one man’s vote in a congressional election is to be worth as much as another’s.”)
So, formally, there’s room for redistricting by voters, rather than persons, though that would require overturning Baker’s reliance on the Equal Protection Clause, at least implicitly.
But this is also the kind of legal casuistry that undermines faith in our system… gaming every last word. We won’t stop doing it, of course, but it’s a pernicious way to approach justice.
With this amount if inaccuracy wouldn’t some of the states be more inclined to go straight to the point and exclude all property owners that aren’t male and white?
“There are bound to be mistakes and inaccuracies,” Wice said. “Any state using this kind of data will end up in a court challenge.”
The GOP doesn’t care if the numbers are accurate or not. They don’t care if the redistricting survives court challenges. The only thing they need is for the rules to be fucked-up on election day, because they believe this country doesn’t have the stomach to re-do an election that was conducted improperly, and that’s the only option that will be available once Truth gets its boots on.
For Republicans, data is accurate when it’s opaque enough that it can’t be proven false. And if they can’t get that, they’ll obscure it in every conceivable way and try again. And I don’t mean that as snark.
Why would “Citizen voting age population” be defendable since way more than half of the current less than 18 year olds would be of voting age and need to be part of the calculation for proportional representation during the period before the 2030 census?
Not saying they should, but I wonder what would stop California from explicitly prohibiting the counting of migrant farm workers. They could probably gerrymander their whole, federally irrigated, farming desert into 2 or 3 districts.
Of course, the Joker is the biggest schemer of them all in that movie. He just wants to prove that everyone is as deranged as he is, once you pare back the benefits of society. I don’t think that Trump reaches that level of sophistication.
Could a competent census bureau devise a survey or statistical technique to estimate citizen/non-citizen population counts by census block that could pass legal muster? Probably.
Can the census bureau under Trump do it? Don’t count on it.
It took them three tries to get their Muslim travel ban through the courts and that was only cause Roberts was willing to selectively overlook the unconstitutional parts.
You are correct. However, there are real doubts about accuracy, in the 80’s I was working on a payroll/personnel information system. A request came in from a government agency for demographic info, including race. Because laws, at the time, forbid the actual info be collected and stored on specific applications while other laws required for other applications that the info was available on demand it was not a straight forward request. I specifically recall this request because it was the first time I actually saw a government order to guess by visual observation if the information was not available. So much for accuracy.
