1960s Supreme Court Forced States to Make Their Voting - History The one thing that one person, one vote decisions could not effect was the use of gerrymandering. Lines dividing electoral districts had resulted in dramatic population discrepancies among the districts. The United States Senate was unaffected by the decision since the Constitution explicitly grants each state two senators. System' is like that of a run-off election. By clicking Accept All, you consent to the use of ALL the cookies. Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. Historians and political scholars have debated the extent to which the franchise for local government contributed to unionist electoral success in controlling councils in nationalist-majority areas.[19]. [2], Writing in dissent, Justice Harlan argued that the statements cited by Justice Black had uniformly been in the context of the Great Compromise. Because a single congressman had to represent two to three times as many people as were represented by congressmen in other districts, the Georgia statute contracted the value of some votes and expanded the value of others. Wesberry v. Sanders | Oyez - {{meta.fullTitle}} Alabama's state legislature resisted redistricting from 1910 to 1972 (when forced by federal court order). We do not believe that the Framers of the Constitution intended to permit the same vote-diluting discrimination to be accomplished through the device of districts containing widely varied numbers of inhabitants. (i.e., subject to trial in a court of law) The majority comprised Chief Justice Earl Warren and Associate Justices Hugo Black, William Douglas, William Brennan, Byron White, and Arthur Goldberg. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. Are congressional districts equal in population? - Sage-Answer But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience. At the district court level, however, a three-judge panel hearing Wesberry's case relied upon an earlier U.S. Supreme Court precedent, Colegrove v. Green (1946), which held reapportionment to be a "political question" outside court jurisdiction. Wesberry v Sanders 1964 Facts Click the card to flip James P. Wesberry, Jr. filed a suit against the Governor of Georgia, Carl E. Sanders, protesting the state's apportionment scheme. Black wrote the following in the court's majority opinion:[3], Harlan dissented, arguing that "the court is not simply undertaking to exercise a power which the Constitution reserves to the Congress; it is also overruling congressional judgment." Coenen, Dan. The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. This rule is followed automatically, of course, when Representatives are chosen as a group on a statewide basis, as was a widespread practice in the first 50 years of our Nation's history. Expert solutions. Policy: Christopher Nelson Caitlin Styrsky Molly Byrne Jimmy McAllister Samuel Postell Some never redrew them, except when it was mandated by reapportionment of Congress and a resulting change in the number of seats to which that state was entitled in the House of Representatives.
