When one person doesn't always equal one vote

The courts—with an assist from Jimmy Carter—school us on one of our democracy's most fundamental "place truths"

In 1962, a relatively unknown young candidate from tiny Plains, Georgia (population: 273) decided to to run for a seat in Georgia’s state legislature. Jimmy Carter had been paying close attention to some recent legal developments in the courts, and decided on a whim that this was the right time to get into politics.

On October 1, 1962, Jimmy's thirty-eighth birthday, Rosalynn noticed that he had changed from khakis and a work shirt into what he called"Sunday pants" She asked if he was going to a funeral. He said, no, he was driving to town to put an ad in the Americus Times-Recorder declaring his candidacy for the Georgia State Senate.

The courts had just invalidated the September primary, and a new one—shorn of the county unit system—would be held in sixteen days.¹

These court decisions happening in Georgia, and which were ongoing in the Supreme Court, were about to make Georgia’s elections a lot fairer. They would also make it easier for the Carter to jumpstart his political career and run successfully for governor, which he eventually did just eight years later.

But what exactly was this “county unit system” in Georgia that the courts invalidated, and why doing so brighten Carter’s political prospects? We can think of it as a kind of Electoral College for statewide primaries for statewide offices of the sort that Carter was already eyeing at the time, like governor:

Under the system, a handful of large "urban" counties with hundreds of thousands of voters had been granted six votes each in state elections, while medium-size "town" counties were awarded four votes, and scores of tiny "rural" counties received two votes each.

As I’ve written about before, this is in theory what the Electoral College does. Texas has more people than Idaho, and it does indeed get more electoral votes. But in practice, the Electoral College continues to overrepresent smaller, more rural states. In this case, the county unit system resulted in situations where Fulton County (where Atlanta is) got only three times as many votes as Georgia’s smallest counties, even through its population was well over two hundred times larger. The courts ruled that as a method of nominating governors, Georgia’s county unit system was a pretty fundamental violation of the core American principle of “one person, one vote”: the idea that the mathematical weight of a person’s vote shouldn’t be any larger or smaller than that of another person within my voting jurisdiction.

Justice William Douglas, writing for the majority in one of the many court cases of this period challenging the county unit system, made the clear commonsense argument: “The conception of political equality, from the Declaration of Independence, to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, to the Fifteenth, Seventeenth, and Nineteenth Amendments can mean only one thing-one person, one vote.”

Georgia’s county unit system was defended vigorously by the rural Democratic (primarily segregationist) establishment, who had ruled the state’s primaries with an iron fist since the post-Civil War period. This can help explain why Jimmy Carter was optimistic about the politics of getting rid of the system. Carter was a rural farmer himself, and not nearly as progressive in the early 60s as he would become later in life. But he also knew that as a less conservative, non-segregationist Democrat, he would benefit politically from support in newly-empowered urban areas, where many more liberal votes (including those of African-Americans) could be found despite Jim Crow-era voter suppression.

Before the disbandment of the county unit system, you pretty much needed to be a staunch segregationist to have a shot at getting enough rural votes to win a statewide Democratic primary election in Georgia. But now? Jimmy Carter might just have a shot in Georgia politics. He put on his “Sunday pants” and got to work.

Jimmy Carter working his peanut farm in Plains, Georgia. Source: Carter Presidential Library

---

“One person, one vote” is not a new refrain, nor was it even new in the 1960s. But it was certainly popularized by a few landmark Supreme Court cases during this time that took on a practice political scientists call malapportionment: when the ratio of voters to representatives varies wildly from electoral district to electoral district, resulting in more mathematical voting power for small-district voters.

Until Carter’s political debut in the early 60s, states were allowed to allocate their congressional districts however they wanted. Even though a state still only got a number of seats in proportion with their population (more seats for Illinois than Delaware), they could draw the lines of these congressional districts essentially however they wanted to, without regard to population size. For example, they could draw one district with 1 million voters, and another district with 100,000 voters. Simple math makes it clear that the vote of a person in the smaller district has more influence than one in a larger district: if one person equals one vote in the smaller district, then one person essentially equals ten votes in the larger.

Because rural areas take up so much geographic space, states could get away with malapportioning heavily in order to over-advantage voters living in low-density counties across the country. This was particularly prevalent not just in Georgia, but throughout the entire South, where rural Democrats locked down the levers of power after the Reconstruction period and coasted for the following century thanks to Jim Crow laws.

But no longer, after these 1960s Supreme Court decisions. In the majority opinion for one crucial malapportionment case, Chief Justice Earl Warren put it pretty bluntly: "Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests."

Correcting this malapportionment is one reason why, for example, we use the Census to count everybody in the country every ten years: we want to make sure that each member of the U.S. House of Representatives is representing roughly the same number of constituents. Take the chart below, which shows each state’s average district size—that is, the number of people per congressional district.

Each state’s average congressional district size as of 2023. These numbers are the total population of each state, divided by the number of congressional districts apportioned to each via the 2020 Census.

There are some outliers to be sure: Delaware and Idaho have pretty big districts, and Rhode Island and Montana have pretty small districts. But there’s nothing nefarious going on here. Because we only have 435 seats in the House to divvy up, it gets tougher to be exact when you get to these small states. Delaware, for example, only has one congressional district, and it’s just a little too small to warrant a second. Montana, on the other hand, gained a second seat after the 2020 Census because its population grew just enough to justify it.

Of course, if you added seats to the House of Representatives, you’d see a much more even and exact distribution, and less malapportionment. But that’s a tale for another day, and the Census Bureau does the best they can. And in the meantime, Baker v. Carr and these other cases have made sure, at the very least, that each congressional district within each state is almost exactly the same size. Both of Montana’s seats are almost the exact same size, and they’re close enough to the national average (around 750k) that we aren’t that concerned.

Now, this gets out of whack the further into a decade you go without redistricting again. People don’t migrate into states evenly among congressional districts, so redrawing boundaries regularly is necessary to combat malapportionment, even if a state’s number of districts doesn’t change.

The story is similar in state legislatures, including the need for redistricting and the Census to make sure malapportionment doesn’t get out of control. In the landmark Supreme Court case that kicked off reforms in this area, Baker v. Carr (1962), the court ruled in favor of a Tennessee resident who alleged—correctly—that Tennessee had not redistricted its state legislature in over sixty years. As a result, residents of districts that had seen a ton of population growth during this time saw their individual voting power plummet, while those in stagnant or shrinking rural districts saw their voting power increase.

Since the Baker decision, however, state legislatures must make the districts within their states equal to each other in population size, so that no district’s voters have a greater share of representation—and of the vote—than anybody else.

---

Halfway through this post, it’s possible you thought angrily to yourself, “I was told there would be no math.” That’s fair. I won’t pretend like I thought these details would be interesting to everyone. But I do think it’s really important to understand how districting works (and how, thankfully, it no longer works) since our representatives in legislatures are supposed to be not just close to us, but equally close to all of us.

Of course, equal representation doesn’t always mean small districts; and small districts aren’t always better or more desirable for representation. As we can see in the chart below, state legislatures vary enormously in how many residents they pack into one of their districts. California, for example, has state legislative districts that are nearly as big as their congressional districts—about half a million residents per district. New Hampshire, meanwhile, has a truly ridiculous 400 seats in its State House of Representatives, which comes out to a little over 3,000 voters per district.

Each state’s average state legislative district size as of 2021. Found by dividing the state’s total population by the total number of districts apportioned in the lower chamber of their state legislature.

And actually, it’s okay that states vary in this way. Bigger states logistically need to have bigger districts in order to function properly as lawmaking bodies. If, for example, California went with New Hampshire’s 3,000 voters-per-district calculus, it would have more than 13,000 seats in the California General Assembly. I wouldn’t wanna be the Speaker of that House of Representatives. Likewise, if New Hampshire had districts as large as California’s, it would have less than three seats in its legislature. Also not ideal. States figure out what works for them, and that’s fine!

But the point here is that, thanks to the Warren Court of the 1960s, states can’t malapportion their way into an inherent unfairness that empowers some of their citizens over the others on a sustained basis. Huge though California’s districts may be, they’re all very close to exactly the same population as each other. Voters in Los Angeles and San Jose can rest assured that their vote counts just the same as everybody else’s in more rural northern California, and vice versa, thanks to the Supreme Court of the 60s.

Even though the courts helped us out with legislatures, and with the “county unit system” of the Jim Crow era that Jimmy Carter was happy to wave goodbye to, we still have plenty of political institutions in America that very much do not live up to the “one person, one vote” standard. The Electoral College is one; the U.S. Senate is, of course, another. Whether this should disqualify these institutions from existing is something I’ll leave up to you, at least for now.

But for now, let’s raise a glass to the Warren court, which—in addition to its landmark rulings on Brown v. Board, due process rights and the first amendment—helped rescue democracy in our legislatures, if only just a little bit.

1. Source: His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life by Jonathan Alter.