The Heritage Foundation’s online Daily Signal just published an article entitled “Does Allowing Noncitizens to Be Counted in Redistricting Violate One Person, One Vote Standard?” The author is Hans von Spakovsky / @HvonSpakovsky
It is a good article but it does not cover all the issues affecting the forced inequities of redistricting.
Readers should have been advised that the Census Bureau counts every breathing person regardless of voter registration, including illegal aliens and non-citizens for the purpose of representation in Congress and respective important presidential electoral votes. Those states with a high illegal and/or legal non-citizen population benefit with more Congressional representation and electoral votes – why? One person, one vote per the Supreme Court? How many of California’s congressional seats and electoral votes are due to illegal aliens and legal non-citizens? Those states with fewer citizens, but due to high illegal alien and non-citizen populations have the same or more Congressional seats and electoral votes per citizen than the citizens from other states. Is this fair or what was intended?
Our Constitution, under the fourteenth amendment required all persons to be counted but it also provided a distinction of the citizen and person, by limiting the vote to males over 21 who are citizens on the United States – a precedent. Subsequently under the fifteenth amendment the right to vote was granted to all citizens, regardless of race or gender – not to all persons via representation or electoral vote. Citizens being the core basis for voting and subsequently representation under one person, one vote. So why shouldn’t a distinction be made between representation for citizens, who are the primary reason representation exists, and all persons?
The Constitution in Article 1 also stated that a census of all persons needs to be conducted every ten years in a manor directed by law from Congress. It is clear that at the founding of this nation there was no attempt to pad the apportioned House of Representatives seats of states and their electoral votes with a count of all persons rather than all citizens. Thus a law from Congress can direct the Census Bureau to determine all persons for needs, funding, etc. and all citizens for representation purposes. The Constitution has already provided the guidance on separating the people from the citizens.
A simple law from Congress should have or can bring equity to redistricting via apportionment and bring the one person, one vote rule back to reality. Require the Census Bureau to ask for the citizenship and perhaps if the person is a registered voter when taking the census and not just blindly seek out every breathing human for the count. The effort by the Census to find breathing humans to count is gargantuan – it even includes issuing flashlights to census takers for coordinated night raids on suspected homeless congregations for an accurate count of all persons.
If the same effort was put into determining the citizen count for a proper apportionment redistricting we could bring balance and fairness back to representation.
STAR SPANGLED THINKING 