One person, one vote: SCOTUS to tell us what it means

[muon2]

The US already uses different counts for apportionment and redistricting. Apportionment includes overseas military and other officials attributed to a specific state. Those persons are not assigned to any census block, so they don't count for redistricting. I don't see any reason that SCOTUS couldn't decide that persons ineligible to vote are also withheld from the redistricting count.

[muon2]

The US already uses different counts for apportionment and redistricting. Apportionment includes overseas military and other officials attributed to a specific state. Those persons are not assigned to any census block, so they don't count for redistricting. I don't see any reason that SCOTUS couldn't decide that persons ineligible to vote are also withheld from the redistricting count.

The order of magnitude of that discrepancy (which is unavoidable), and to a lessor extent the discrepancy between CD size of a one CD state up or down as compared to multi CD states (also unavoidable), is relatively minor as compared to the avoidable discrepancy that would be introduced by virtue of counting non citizens for purposes of inter state allocations, but not intra state allocations.

The present discrepancy is avoidable, since overseas military personnel could be assigned to their last home state address, in much the same way as some states are doing with their prison populations.

I understand that there is a matter of degree, and I am not advocating for a particular standard, but if SCOTUS finds for the plaintiffs in the question of redistricting, I think they can read the constitutional language on apportionment as a strict count of all persons in the state. Though I will be curious to see the arguments, it does seem that the inconsistency today is the use of CVAP to count for VRA purposes, but not for the overall district population.

[muon2]

A better solution would be for the federal government to issue ID cards and require that they be accepted for federal elections without a further registration step.  The federal government would feed changes in addresses to the state election authorities, to permit automatic update of voter registration rolls.  States could continue to augment their voting rolls with people without federal IDs, but why would they bother?

A voter would be more likely to update the address on a federal ID when they moved, even more likely than they are their mailing address or their driver's license both of which have some everyday utility.  If a voter only thinks that a voting address has quadrennial utility, there is no benefit in keeping it current.

This is effectively how voter registration works in Australia: rolls are maintained at a state and federal level, but in effect, the states just copy the relevant bits from the federal roll.

It seems that one could also do the reverse. With Real ID, the states have to maintain records that include residency and citizenship to comply with federal standards. Those are generally supposed to key in through the drivers license or equivalent state-issued ID. States with online voter registration like IL already link the license data to the election data to confirm registration eligibility. Linking across the states isn't a big step beyond that.