One Person, One Vote

• Publication year: 2024
• Citation: Vol. 47 No. 4

One Person, One VoteVol. 47 No. 4 Pg. 26Wyoming Bar JournalAugust 2024

By Hon. Nathaniel S. Hibben

Every 10 years, the Wyoming legislature undertakes a redistricting process. Under the current districting plan, the geographic lines of each district for the Wyoming House of Representatives are drawn so that it contains approximately 9,300 people, and each district in the Wyoming Senate are drawn so that it contains approximately 18,600 people.

The principle of drawing legislative districts so that each contain approximately equal population has become known as "one-person, one vote."

I was curious what the law had to say about "one-person, one vote" and Wyoming's legislative districting process. Here's a summary of what I read, which I share as a starting point for those interested in further reading.^[1]

General Principles

"One-person, one vote" is shorthand for the idea that the weight and worth of one person's vote must be equal to that of another person's vote in an adjacent district. Under this principle, apportioning legislative districts solely by county rather than equal population violates the Equal Protection clause of the 14^th Amendment. The federal courts have held that the Equal Protection clause of the 14^th Amendment requires that all legislative districts be about the same in population size. Anything else impermissibly dilutes the voting power of people living in other districts.

Court Cases

A series of six cases was argued before the United States Supreme Court in 1963 and 1964. Known collectively as the Reapportionment Cases, these decisions invalidated the apportionment of state legislatures that districted by political subdivisions, such as the county, rather than by population. In 1964, that included nearly every state legislature. The Reapportionment Cases held that legislative representation must be allocated through districts that contain roughly equal populations. This principle became known as "one-person, one vote." As a result, these decisions invalidated the districting apportionment of almost every state legislature.

The first case to announce the principle of "one-person one vote" was Gray v. Sanders, 372 U.S. 368 (1963). That case involved a challenge to the Georgia system of selecting its legislators based on county lines. Voters challenged that apportionment, claiming their vote had been diluted. The United States Supreme Court agreed and found Georgia's legislative districting system unconstitutional. Justice Douglas wrote for the Court:

How then can one person be given twice or 10 times the voting power of another person in a statewide election merely because he lives in a rural area or because he lives in the smallest rural county? Once the geographical unit for which a representative is to be chosen is designated, all who participate in the election are to have an equal vote— whatever their race, whatever their sex, wherever their occupation, whatever their income, and whatever their home may be in that geographical unit. This is required by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Id. at 379. The Court concluded:

The conception of political equality from the Declaration of Independence, to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, to the Fifteenth, Seventeenth, and Nineteenth Amendments can mean only one thing—one person, one vote.

Most famously, the United States Supreme Court invalidated Alabama's legislative districts in Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533 (1964). At that time, Alabama's state senate districts varied in population from 15,000 to over 630,000, and its state house of representative districts varied in population from 31,000 to 634,000. Id. at 545546. Chief Justice Warren wrote for the Court:

Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests. As long as ours is a representative form of government, and our legislatures are those instruments of government elected directly by and directly representative of the people, the right to elect representatives in a free and unimpaired fashion is a bedrock of a political system.

Id. at 562. In contrast to individual States,

political subdivisions of States—counties, cities, or whatever—never were and never have been considered as sovereign entities.

Id. at 575. And:

If a State should provide that the votes of citizens in one part...