Richard Wolf

USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court refused Monday to change the way state and municipal voting districts are drawn, denying an effort by conservatives that could have increased the number of rural, mostly white districts at the expense of urban, largely Hispanic ones.

The "one person, one vote" case was among the most consequential of the high court's term, and it delivered a major victory for civil rights groups that opposed opening the door to drawing districts based on the number of voters, rather than total population. The unanimous ruling left intact Texas' method — followed by nearly all states — of counting residents when drawing state and local voting districts.

Challengers had argued only eligible voters should be counted, a method that would have allowed states to ignore non-citizens, children and others who do not vote. In most cases, that would have helped Republican candidates and hurt Democrats; diverse, inner-city districts would include more people and rural districts fewer, increasing the clout of white voters.

If the court had ruled that districts should be based on eligible voters rather than total population, states with large numbers of non-citizens would have seen the biggest change — Texas, California, New York, New Jersey, Arizona and Nevada among them. Cities such as Chicago and Miami also would have been affected.

'One person, one vote' case could upend politics

Six justices signed on to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's opinion, including Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, the most conservative members of the court, agreed to the result but not the reasoning.

"Adopting voter-eligible apportionment as constitutional command would upset a well-functioning approach to districting that all 50 states and countless local jurisdictions have followed for decades, even centuries," Ginsburg wrote.

Because challengers had sought to force a change to counting only eligible voters, the court did not rule on other options — whether states can switch to counting voters or combine the two methods. No states currently do that, partly because data on voters is less reliable than Census figures for total population.

"We need not and do not resolve whether, as Texas now argues, states may elect to draw districts to equalize voter population instead," Ginsburg said.

Thomas and Alito agreed that Texas cannot be forced to switch to using only eligible voters in drawing districts, but they said switching is not necessarily unconstitutional.

"The choice is best left for the people of the states to decide for themselves how they should apportion their legislature," Thomas wrote.

"Whether a state is permitted to use some measure other than total population is an important and sensitive question that we can consider if and when we have before us a state districting plan that, unlike the current Texas plan, uses something other than total population as the basis for equalizing the size of districts," Alito wrote.

The equal protection clause of the Constitution is supposed to guarantee each person the same political power. The problem is that the Supreme Court still has not decided who should be counted — all people, or just voters. Monday's decision in Evenwel v. Abbott merely says states' use of total population is constitutional.

During oral argument in December, several justices appeared to agree that the standard by which election districts are drawn is imperfect. But they couldn't come up with a better way.

Supreme Court justices divided on 'one person, one vote'

Debating a case that threatened to upend the political balance in the nation from New York to California, the more conservative justices indicated they were open at least to incorporating voter population into the mix. The more liberal justices opposed going to eligible voters, which would render non-citizens invisible when drawing districts — along with children, prisoners, some ex-felons and some people with intellectual disabilities.

Those justices warned that incorporating voter population likely would jeopardize other goals, such as drawing compact districts and respecting municipal boundaries. They also noted that congressional seats already must be apportioned based on population, and that survey data on eligible voters is less reliable.

Perhaps most important, they said, is the need to keep districts relatively equal in terms of population so that all residents have the same access to their elected officials. "There is a voting interest," Justice Sonia Sotomayor acknowledged when the case was debated. "But there is also a representation interest."

The challengers' argument boiled down to this: Texas' population-based system puts more voters in districts with few non-voters, thereby diluting the weight of their votes. In heavily Hispanic districts or others with large numbers of non-voters, the remaining residents' votes carry greater weight.

But switching to counting only voters "would have made every legislative map in the country unconstitutional and required massively shifting political representation out of fast-growing urban and suburban communities to rural and slower-growing areas," said Michael Li, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law.

Janai Nelson, associate director-counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, noted that the court's unanimous judgment was particularly noteworthy "at a moment when it is facing struggles of its own and coming out with a number of 4-4 decisions." The court has deadlocked twice in the past two weeks following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

The case pitted scores of civil rights organizations, who wanted to protect the interests of minorities, against a lesser number of conservative and libertarian groups who wanted the metric changed so that voting comes before representation.

“With this ruling, jurisdictions will and must continue to redraw district boundaries in an inclusive manner while adhering to the fundamental principle of one person, one vote," said Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. "Today’s decision renders null and void efforts to marginalize minority communities from having an equal seat at the table in our political process.”

Edward Blum, director of the Project on Fair Representation, which initiated the case along with several other Supreme Court challenges to racial and ethnic preferences in voting and higher education, expressed disappointment at the verdict.

“The issue of voter equality in the United States is not going to go away," Blum said. "Some Supreme Court cases grow in importance over time, and Evenwel v. Abbott may likely be one of those cases.”