Three-Fifths
America has a history of unbalanced voting rights. In the beginning, most of the states the Founding Fathers represented counted every person. But only white men, over the age of twenty-one, who owned property; were actually allowed to vote.
Voting imbalance was enshrined in the US Constitution, through the infamous Three-Fifths Compromise. How many representatives a state would get in the House of Representatives (and the Electoral College) was determined by adding to, “…the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other persons.” Those three-fifths were the enslaved people, Black people. They were “good enough” to partially count for the purpose of determining representation and taxation. But they certainly didn’t have the right to vote.
Like Jefferson’s famous “All Men are created equal”, the right to vote was carefully apportioned among the privileged. It took a Civil War and almost one hundred and eighty years of history to reach a point where, at least theoretically, every citizen could vote.
Constitutional Inequality
But even then, everyone’s vote is not “equal”. There are Constitutional inequities: each state, no matter its population size, has two Senators. Because of that, smaller states citizens are “weighted” in the Senate and the Electoral College. A citizen’s vote for President in Ohio is one in about 700,000 per Elector in the College. A citizens vote in Wyoming is almost four times more “powerful”, one in 172,000. Folks in Wyoming have “more say”, but states like California, Texas, New York and Florida obviously have more total votes.
Wyoming’s population, with its two Senators and three Electoral Votes, is the population of the Youngstown-Warren metro area here in Ohio. When you see giant “red and blue” maps of how counties voted for President, the United States looks overwhelmingly “red”. But land doesn’t vote, people do. American votes are amassed in urban areas, many on the East and West Coasts. Check out the population based maps, rather than the geographic ones. America is a lot “bluer” that way (see the maps in this essay from 2019, Sleeping Serpents).
Though the middle of the twentieth century, some states modeled the US Constitution in their own state legislatures. State House of Representative districts, like the US House, were divided equally by population. But State Senate seats were divided into “historic” districts, and like the US Senate. Many were “unbalanced” in population. It wasn’t until 1964, the year of the Civil Rights Act, that the US Supreme Court applied “one person, one vote”. That case, Reynolds v Sims, ruled for all offices, except the Constitutional ones. For every state elected office, each vote must count equally. The Court upheld that principle 9-0 as late as the 2016 case Evenwel v Abbott.
Who Gets to Choose
In every state in the Union, the voters choose their elected public officials. But now, in 2022, a year and a half after the Insurrection, the Texas Republican Party has a new proposal. As passed in their Houston convention last week, they said:
“The State Legislature shall cause to be enacted a State Constitutional Amendment creating an electoral college consisting of electors selected by the popular votes cast within each individual state senatorial district, who shall then elect all statewide office holders.”
Why would they choose a “state” electoral college? And it’s not just to select the Governor and Lieutenant Governor. There are twenty-seven statewide elected officials in Texas, including the entire Supreme Court and Criminal Appellate Courts.
There are thirty-one State Senate districts in Texas, carefully “drawn” (Gerrymandered) to provide an 18 to 13 Republican majority in the Senate. Texas election results in 2020 were 52% Republican and 46% Democrat – a 16 to 15 split if the Senate was drawn fairly. Now the Republicans in Texas want to “amplify” the power of that Gerrymandering, by creating a State Electoral College, to make sure that every statewide office remains in Republican hands. There would be no chance that a Beto O’Rourke or Julian Castro might slip in on a statewide majority of Democratic votes.
Extreme is Normal
We might say that the State Republican Convention in Texas is extreme. They are against homosexuality (“an abnormal lifestyle”), reject the outcome of the election of 2020 (Biden an illegitimate President), and raising the age to buy an assault rifle to twenty-one (they might need them in a hurry to protect from a riot). But with an extreme United States Supreme Court, that continues to allow the Texas “Plan” of enforcing abortion bans through civil suits rather than state action, who knows what actually could become “law”?
The Texas Republican legislature is even debating a resolution to ignore any Federal law they don’t like. That’s in spite of the fact that the US Constitution says Federal law is supreme, and the concept of “nullification”, popular in the early years of the United States, died a bloody death in the Civil War.
One person, one vote wouldn’t matter then in Texas, at least as far as choosing their state officials are concerned. The will of a majority of Texans might not matter either. And Republicans would have at least a decade-long lock on power in the state, majority or not.
It’s the 2020’s – whatever you thought was “America”, you better believe your “lying” eyes now. Don’t count Texas Republicans out – they may disenfranchise near half their voters. And the US Supreme Court might let them.
