Do Elected Officials Represent Everyone or Just Those Who Can Vote?

The Evenwel v. Abbott case argued Tuesday before the U.S. Supreme Court is about the drawing of legislative districts at the state and congressional levels, but it began as an issue among cities. For that civic genesis we can look back to the early 1960s when the Supreme Court ruled that states that continued to afford legislative voting advantages to rural areas, even as they were thinning out in population, over urban areas, which by this point were peaking in population, violated the U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.

A more recent starting point, though, is the 2000 Chen v. City of Houston case, where some residents challenged the city’s drawing of council districts because it was based on total population as opposed to the number of people eligible to vote.