According to the A.C.L.U (American Civil Liberties Union) on the big Supreme Court voting case in Washington last month said, “states should be allowed to count everybody in drawing election districts, including unauthorized immigrants, rather than only people eligible to vote.”
To me and probably a lot of others; this is a highly controversial claim. Saying that illegal immigrants should count in drawing election districts is preposterous! I understand that some are working towards becoming legalized United Stated citizens but until that is complete I do not believe you should have the right to vote. Even though I was little when it happened I became a naturalized citizen after being legally adopted from Guatemala; even I, a small child, underwent a process which involved lots of paperwork (my parents did that), along with paying a lawyer here in the United States to garner my citizenship (my parents did that too), and eventually learning the Pledge of Allegiance. It’s a small feat but it still counts as something.
But the A.C.L.U is spouting something completely different, “in a pair of recent lawsuits it filed in Rhode Island and Florida, in which it objected to counting prisoners when drawing voting districts. Counting prisoners in one district, the lawsuits said, “dilutes the voting strength and political influence” of eligible voters in other districts.”
Um…what? Are we detecting a bit of hypocrisy here? “There may be good reasons for treating prisoners differently from other people who cannot vote. But it is also true that counting prisoners, often housed in rural areas, tends to amplify the power of Republican voters. Counting unauthorized immigrants, who often live in urban areas, generally helps Democrats.” So it’s a two way street for either party- get the votes from everybody and it’s a completely different ballgame.
In the Evenwel v. Abbott, No. 14-940 (a voting rights case) neither side has given much mind to the millions of people behind bars. “They are not concerned about the counting of ineligible voters, only certain types of ineligible voters,” said Nathaniel Persily, a law professor at Stanford who filed a brief supporting the state. “It seems to me a pretty strange constitutional argument that would say that noncitizens should be subtracted from the redistricting calculus but prisoners should be included.”
Persily also added, “that when this comes up at oral argument, they will quickly admit that prisoners, too, should be subtracted from the apportionment count.” The case is set to be argued Dec. 8.
So quick to back down after being confronted on how ludicrous it is.
“In a brief filed in April urging the Supreme Court to consider their appeal, the plaintiffs did quote, a little gleefully, a passage from the A.C.L.U.’s Florida lawsuit. “The ‘one person, one vote’ principle of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment mandates that each person’s vote shall be equal to that of his or her fellow citizens,” the A.C.L.U.’s lawsuit said, in language that could have come from the Texas plaintiffs.”
Since this next section is gonna be hard to break down, I’m taking the next few sections from a NY Times article to address what is really going on.
“Dale Ho, the director of the A.C.L.U.’s voting rights project, said the group had not addressed the prison suits because lawyers also involved in the Rhode Island case had filed a separate friend-of-the-court brief to the Supreme Court devoted to the question of “prison gerrymandering.”
Mr. Ho said the A.C.L.U. believed that prisoners, who are generally ineligible to vote if convicted of felonies, should indeed be counted in drawing election districts — but in the places where they used to live. He made the argument at length in a 2011 article in the Stanford Law & Policy Review.
Brenda Wright, one of the lawyers who filed the separate Supreme Court brief, said: “The basic distinction is that we’re addressing a problem that is based on where the population is counted. It is not based on an assertion that populations that can’t vote shouldn’t be counted.”
The brief, filed by Demos and the Prison Policy Initiative, rejected what it called “false parallels” between the prisoner cases and the Texas appeal. “The goal of reforming prison gerrymandering,” the brief said, “is not at all comparable to appellants’ goal of entirely excluding nonvoters from the population base.”
And it’s in the last paragraph that says it all. “The goal of reforming prison gerrymandering,” the brief said, “is not at all comparable to appellants’ goal of entirely excluding nonvoters from the population base.”
Just food for thought for everyone to think about.
Talk to you guys next week!
Hugs Xoxo
tessamariaa 
Well Done.
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