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One of the most firmly established principles of constitutional law is "one person, one vote,"1 meaning that legislative districts within each state must be equal in population. There are no dissenters from that proposition on the Supreme Court, and there have been none for decades. Legislatures, litigants, judges, and academics all accept the proposition. Yet as a matter of text and history, that proposition is almost certainly incorrect, and judicial enforcement of it has produced unintended results that are perverse from many different points of view.
In order to bring legislative districts as close to "precise mathematical equality" as possible, states must disregard preexisting political boundaries such as cities, townships, and counties. Adherence to these traditional boundaries was, historically, the principal constraint on creative districting, popularly known as "gerrymandering." Once freed from these traditional constraints by the Supreme Court's "precise mathematical equality rule," legislative line-drawers were able to draw maps to produce the results they desired, rendering elections less a reflection of popular opinion than of legislative craftsmanship. The problem has become particularly acute with modern computer districting software, which allows map-- makers to create imaginative districts with the precision of a surgeon. The results? Protection for incumbents, a tendency toward homogeneous-and hence more partisan-districts, racial and partisan gerrymandering, and ultimately, a widespread sense that elections do not matter.
Needless to say, these were not the objectives the Supreme Court thought it was pursuing when it embarked on its great adventure of solving the malapportionment problem. It behooves students of the political process to understand the mistakes that were made, and their results, if only as an object lesson that departure from the actual text and meaning of the Constitution, even in service of well-intentioned goals, can have unintended consequences.
This is not to say that the old system of grossly malapportioned legislatures was constitutionally proper, or that the courts were wrong to take steps to dismantle it. My point, instead, is that the Court adopted a legal theory for addressing the issue that was wrong in principle and mischievous in its consequences. More careful attention to constitutional text and history would have produced a better solution.
1. THE REDISTRICTING PROBLEM BEFORE BAKER V. CARR
Until the early 1960s, the federal courts played no role...