Numbers, Not Voters

Your weekly excerpt from one of my books. This week: "The Hidden History of the War on Voting"

The Republican War against your right to vote. Over the next few months the entire book will be here, new chapters posted every Sunday, for subscribers to read at no cost. If you want to get a physical book to mark up or share with others, just click on the picture above, visit your local bookstore, or check your favorite online seller.

Numbers, Not Voters

Aside from outright attacks and procedural hurdles that suppress the vote and give Republicans an edge (more on those in the following chapters), there is another two-pronged attack in the Republicans’ war to preserve minority rule in America.

The first prong is that a faction of Republicans wants to find a new answer to the broad question “Who deserves representation in the United States?”

This question is as old as the country, and it was even re-answered with the ratification of the 14th Amendment. As Senator Jacob Howard, R-Michigan, explained when he introduced the 14th Amendment:

“The basis of representation should depend upon numbers   Numbers, not voters; numbers, not property; this is the theory of the Constitution.”

But this theory of the Constitution is being increasingly challenged by America’s right wing.

In 2016, the Supreme Court heard Evenwel v. Abbott, wherein two Texas voters had sued the state of Texas in an attempt to overturn the constitutional principle that “every person deserves representation.”

As the New York Times reported in June 2019, [the plaintiffs’] preferred method, shared by a number of conservative politicians, would erase from state political maps not only noncitizens, but also children—two groups that aren’t evenly distributed across states.

The resulting maps would tend to shift power from the places where children and noncitizens are more plentiful to places where there are more older and white residents. At the state level, such maps would also strip from these groups a principle as old as the Constitution: that even someone who cannot vote still deserves representation.64

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the state could draw districts based on overall population—but the Court also left the door open as to whether states could choose to draw district maps based only on the voting-age population. In the words of the late Republican “redistricter par excellence” Thomas B. Hofeller, such maps in Texas “would be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.”

Hofeller drew thousands of maps in his life—thousands of permutations of state maps drawn and redrawn to find all the ways that Republicans could gain electoral advantages without violating the letter of the Voting Rights Act.

When he died, Republicans had no idea that he had saved those maps on hard drives. They also had no idea that Hofeller’s daughter would discover those hard drives—and then turn them over to Common Cause, a government accountability group. When Common Cause went through his files, they found a trove of prepared maps for redistricting Republican-controlled states such as Texas and North Carolina.

The files, along with Hofeller’s notes, serve as a smoking gun of the Republicans’ concerted effort to draw new districts that nominally meet the criteria of the Voting Rights Act but functionally give “Republicans and non-Hispanic whites” an electoral advantage as a nationwide minority.

A key aspect of his plan was that Republican-controlled states would be allowed to count their population based on voting-age population instead of total population, because blacks and, particularly, Hispanics tend to have more children than whites at this time.