Voting suits based on Constitution
While the Pennsylvania School Code requires school district voting regions to be “as nearly equal as possible,” residents who sued three Fayette County school districts did so with the Constitution as a basis. “One man, one vote,” afforded by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, was the war cry in both Connellsville Area and Brownsville Area school districts when residents successfully challenged the population differences in the voting regions. A dozen residents in the Albert Gallatin Area School District also used the Constitution in a challenge of the voting regions, although a U.S. District Court judge recently closed that action.
“One man, one vote means the district that elects people has to have the same numbers of voters appropriately,” said Bruce Ledevitz, constitutional law professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.
Ledevitz referred to the 1970 case of Hadley vs. Junior College District. Although this case dealt with a junior college board of trustees, Ledevitz said it stands to reason the case has bearing on public school districts.
The Supreme Court ruled that whenever a state gives governmental functions to a body that comes from districts, those districts must have substantially equal populations.
“Each district must have an equal number of voters for proportional equal number of representatives,” Ledevitz said.
Michael Comiskey, Penn State Fayette associate professor in political science, explained the 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution after the Civil War, around 1868, and among its many provisions is the equal protection clause.
“The equal protection clause says that every state must afford the equal protection of the laws,” he said.
Until the 1960s, he said, many of the state legislatures were malapportioned, and typically, “the rural areas were over represented.”
In the early 1960s, the Supreme Court said that representation in both houses of state legislatures had to be equal. Every state House and Senate district had to have the same populations, so state legislatures had to redistrict themselves.
“That’s called one man, one vote,” Comiskey said. “Every 10 years when the census comes out, changes in legislative seats are possible because of the one man, one vote provision.”
For instance, if a rural state counted 10,000 people for every representative, big cities may have had 100,000 people for every representative. So, Comiskey said, the people in the rural areas had more representation.
Pennsylvania lost two congressional seats because of low population growth in the 2000 U.S. census. This change has left U.S. Reps. Frank Mascara and John Murtha in a race against each other for representation of a newly rearranged district.
Comiskey said the equal protection clause has broad application.
“It was put in right after the Civil War to protect former slaves. No state could deny to any person equal protection of laws,” Comiskey said. “In later years, the Supreme Court applied it to others. In 1971 the equal protection clause was extended to women.”
As far as voting is concerned, the equal protection clause means that one person’s vote weighs the same as another’s.
“Our Constitution leaves a lot of things open to interpretation, so issues get handed off to the courts,” Comiskey said.