Summary
Professor Nathaniel Persily discusses how the ACLU’s argument against counting prisoners for drawing districts seems like a “strange constitutional argument” in this New York Times article.
The American Civil Liberties Union weighed in last month on this term’s big Supreme Court voting rights case, the one that will decide the meaning of “one person, one vote.” It took the position embraced by most liberals: that states should be allowed to count everybody in drawing election districts, including unauthorized immigrants, rather than only people eligible to vote.
But the group seemed to take the opposite position in a pair of recent lawsuits it filed in Rhode Island and Florida, in which it objected to counting prisoners when drawing voting districts. Counting prisoners in one district, the lawsuits said, “dilutes the voting strength and political influence” of eligible voters in other districts.
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“They are not concerned about the counting of ineligible voters, only certain types of ineligible voters,” said Nathaniel Persily, a law professor at Stanford who filed a brief supporting the state. “It seems to me a pretty strange constitutional argument that would say that noncitizens should be subtracted from the redistricting calculus but prisoners should be included.”
“I expect, however,” he added, “that when this comes up at oral argument, they will quickly admit that prisoners, too, should be subtracted from the apportionment count.” The case is set to be argued Dec. 8.
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