Texas Tribune 12/24/10Electoral Power is about Voting, Not PopulationYou can make political districts the same size, but you can’t make them politically equal.
Lawmakers will spend the next six months drawing political maps for Texas, doing their decennial readjustment to make sure each district has the same number of people. But when they’re done, some parts of the state will still get more political attention than others, and the voters have only themselves to blame.
Politicians care most about the part of the population that votes. El Paso County has 92,680 more people than Denton County, for instance. But Denton turned out 42,043 more voters in November. Which is more attractive to a statewide candidate?
New 2010 census numbers put the state’s population at 25.1 million, up from 20.9 million in 2000. In the next few months, the counters will get more specific about where those people are. The Legislature will divide the total population by the number of members in each body — 36 Texans in Congress, 31 in the state Senate, 150 in the state House and 15 on the State Board of Education — and draw political districts of equal size for each.
Districts must have the same numbers of people so that, for instance, each of the state’s 31 Senate districts will have 811,147 Texans in it. But they’re never the same size in voter participation, and ultimately, there’s no way to tell without an election or two.
Voters have only themselves to blame - and that goes for non-voting eligible voters as well!