Who would the ideal parties be in a voting rights suit based on the Census prisoner miscount?
The ideal lawsuit would be brought on behalf of voting-eligible members of high-incarceration neighborhoods against a state legislature. The argument would be that the state legislature violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause and — in most states — the state constitution by using Census Bureau data. “One person, one vote,” and most states’ definition of residence, require a redistricting dataset that counts people at their actual homes. Our position, and that of D.C. v. Commerce, is that the Census Bureau has a very limited constitutional mandate: to count the population of each state for purposes of reapportionment. Congress has expanded this mandate to include providing redistricting data to the states and other research purposes, and it is possible that this expansion of the Census’ role could give rise to Bureau liability for aiding the dilution of urban and minority voting strength.
