The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear Evenwel v. Abbott, a case brought by a group of Texas conservatives challenging a longstanding precedent that holds that election districts should be drawn to equalize the number of residents in each district (the "one man/person, one vote" principle). If the appeal succeeds, states and other jurisdictions would presumably be required to apportion based upon the number of legal voters in each district, not the number of total residents. The result would inevitably dilute the political power of immigrant groups in states with large immigrant populations, such as California and Texas.
Some background: The apportionment of U.S. Congressional districts is governed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which dictates that "Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed." The Fourteenth Amendment's apportionment of representation among the states according to total population is clear and unambiguous, and a ruling in this case would not change it.
The idea that districts within each state should contain equal numbers of residents, however, remained unsettled until nearly a century after the Fourteenth Amendment was passed. Many states simply never redrew their congressional and legislative district boundaries as cities grew due to industrialization and migration patterns, with the result being that city dwellers in these states came to be severely underrepresented in Congress and their state legislatures compared to their more rural fellows. It was not until 1963 that the U.S. Supreme Court decided the landmark Reynolds v. Sims case, which held that unequal districts violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (section 1, rather than section 2 quoted above).
The state of Texas, the appellee in this case, has precedent on its side, but the appellants' argument that the voting protections conferred by the equal protection clause should be understood to apply only to legal voters is not an entirely uncompelling one, and with a conservative court that has shown its willingness to overturn precedent when it suits the justices, a victory for the appellants seems likely to this lay observer.
