Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in an opinion joined by the court's other liberals as well as Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy, explicitly put aside the question of whether states could choose to use measures of registered voters when line-drawing and to what extent they could do so. | AP Photo Supreme Court rejects challenge to 'one person, one vote' definition

In a unanimous ruling Monday on procedures for drawing state and local legislative districts, the Supreme Court rejected a legal challenge that could have diminished the political power of Latinos and some city-dwellers.

The high court held that states can rely on broad measures of population when setting district boundaries and need not to take into account how many eligible voters live in each district.


The result is that states can stick with maps that give greater representation to areas with large concentrations of foreign nationals, children or prisoners — an arrangement that experts say tends to benefit Democrats due to the demographics of their base.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in an opinion joined by the court’s other liberals as well as Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy, explicitly put aside the question of whether states could choose to use measures of registered voters when line-drawing and to what extent they could do so.

However, the high court said states are not obliged to consider the count of voters in order to comply with the “one person, one vote” principle derived from the Constitution.

“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. Appellants have shown no reason for the Court to disturb this longstanding use of total population,” Ginsburg wrote.

Ginsburg also said there were strong reasons to base districts on overall population.

“Nonvoters have an important stake in many policy debates — children, their parents, even their grandparents, for example, have a stake in a strong public-education system — and in receiving constituent services, such as help navigating public-benefits bureaucracies. By ensuring that each representative is subject to requests and suggestions from the same number of constituents, total-population apportionment promotes equitable and effective representation,” she wrote.

The court’s two most conservative judges, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, wrote separately. In an opinion largely endorsed by Thomas, Alito said the court’s majority erred by suggesting that the Constitution leans toward use of total population because House seats are allocated that way. Alito noted that power in the Senate is without regard to population and even in the House, some small states get greater weight on a per capita basis because every state is guaranteed at least one House seat.

In a separate, solo opinion, Thomas criticized the court’s jurisprudence on apportionment as a confusing hodgepodge of rationales. He said that the Constitution appears to bless both methods of balancing districts, so the federal courts should not try to dictate either one.

“As far as the original understanding of the Constitution is concerned, a State has wide latitude in selecting its population base for apportionment,” Thomas wrote. “It can use total population, eligible voters, or any other non-discriminatory voter base.”

The court’s ruling has no direct impact on congressional apportionment, which is dictated by the Constitution based on a total-population census. However, in advance of Monday’s decision, some lawyers said aspects of the court’s rationale could eventually influence battles over the allocation of and redistricting for House seats.

The case is Evenwel v. Abbott out of Texas.

