U.S. top court to hear 'one person, one vote' challenge in Texas case

By Lawrence Hurley WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Tuesday to decide whether urban, often Hispanic voters get too much voting power because of the way state legislative districts are drawn in a Texas case that could end up giving more clout to rural Republican voters. The court will hear a challenge, backed by a conservative group, that contends that the manner in which Texas determines legislative districts - based not on the number of eligible voters but rather on total population - violates the U.S. Constitution's principle of "one person, one vote." If the court embraces the argument, it could affect the drawing of legislative districts not just in Texas but in other states such as Arizona and California with large, non-citizen immigrant communities that include many Hispanics. The challengers say the redistricting map signed into law in 2013 did not equally distribute voters, inflating the voting power of urban areas at the expense of other parts of the state. Some of the urban districts include large populations of non-citizens, mainly Hispanics, who are not eligible to vote. A ruling for the challengers "could favor Republicans and rural areas, which tend to have fewer non-citizens," said election law expert Rick Hasen of the University of California, Irvine School of Law. The Texas Senate districts, drawn so each had a total population of around 810,000, were initially imposed by court order ahead of the 2012 elections but were later adopted by the Republican-led state legislature and signed into law by then-Governor Rick Perry, a Republican, in 2013. The challengers, voters Sue Evenwel and Edward Pfenninger, claim the districts violate the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection under the law because they are at odds with the "one person, one vote" principle. Evenwel and Pfenninger are backed by the Project on Fair Representation, a conservative group with a history of challenging policies that take race into account. The group said there are "wild disparities in the number of people per district who actually have the legal right to cast a ballot." In Evenwel's rural district, fewer people are eligible to vote than in a nearby urban district, meaning that "voters in the urban district have more sway than in the rural district," the group said. Lawyers for Texas, defending the redistricting, said in a court papers that nothing in the Constitution requires legislative districts to be drawn based on the number of eligible voters as opposed to total population. The court will hear oral arguments in its next term, which starts in October and ends in June 2016. The case is Evenwel v. Abbot, U.S. Supreme Court, 14-940. (Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Will Dunham)