SPOKANE, Wash. – A Washington citizen has 0.7 of a vote in a presidential election compared to a Montana voter. Will Schroeder, an attorney who practices in Spokane, has petitioned the US Supreme Court to ensure that each person has an equal vote regardless of where they live.
Schroeder’s case is derived from a century-old law that capped the size of the US Congress at 435 seats, which has led to unequally sized voting districts.
“The specific statute that is supposed to say how many representatives there are and why is really convoluted,” Schroeder said.
When the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 passed it kept the number of House Districts at 435 with the stipulation that every state have at least one congressional district.
“America is about three times bigger than we were back when they wrote this law in 1929. The result is that representation in the House isn’t just by population anymore. Instead, after each census, they take the same number of representatives and distribute them across the 50 states,” Schroeder said.
That means that voting districts are not precisely apportioned based upon population, and voters in some districts have more voting power in both congressional and presidential elections due to each state being required to have at least a single district.
“There isn’t really a way to do that and have each representative represent the same number of people because the goal is just to have 435,” Schroeder said.
If he were to win his case in front of the Court, Washington could potentially pick up additional representation in Congress and align more closely with each person’s vote having identical sway in presidential elections.
While the Court doesn’t have to pick up Schroeder’s case, his petition will be read by the justices due it being successfully appealed from the US Ninth Court of Appeals.
There is precedent for the Court hearing cases regarding equal vote apportionment, with the Court unanimously ruling that apportionment should “achieve the greatest possible equality in the number of individuals per representative” in 1992.
