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Arizona Minority Coalition For Fair Redistricting v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission10/21/2005
ssion to adopt definitions of the aforementioned terms. The Commission contests these conclusions and argues that no authority supports them.
The Coalition counters that without standards to guide them, the Commissioners relied on individual, subjective ad hoc rationales in applying the map-drawing criteria and, in so doing, failed to treat all voters alike. Similarly, Flagstaff contends that lack of definitions both allowed the Commission to perform its work in an arbitrary fashion and prevented adequate evaluation to ensure uniform treatment. It also argues that standards are needed, for example, to assist the Commission in identifying communities of interest because if a community were placed in a single district, the votes of that community "have weight behind the ."
In asserting that the Commission violated the Equal Protection Clause and failed to uniformly apply the various criteria in adopting its final 2002 legislative plan, the Coalition and Flagstaff rely on Gore. As previously noted, in Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court found that "the use of standardless manual recounts" in a presidential election denied equal protection to some members of the electorate. 531 U.S. at 103. The Court observed that an important aspect of the right to vote is the equal weight and dignity of each vote; accordingly, having "granted the right to vote on equal terms, the State may not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person's vote over that of another." Id. at 104-05. The Florida Supreme Court seriously infringed upon this right by ordering examination of some ballots for which the voting machines had not detected a vote for president to discern the voter's intent when the counties conducting the examination used different rules to evaluate intent. Id. at 105. As a result, the votes of some citizens would be validated and counted while the ballots of others would not be re-examined. Id. at 107-08. After concluding that equal protection demanded that the ballots be evaluated by uniform rules so that similarly situated voters would be treated alike, the Court emphasized that its holding was limited "to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities." Id. at 109.
The Commission contends that no other court, including the Supreme Court, has cited Gore in a redistricting case and that Gore is limited to its unique facts. Flagstaff responds that Gore is not so limited because the Ninth Circuit cited it in Charfauros, 249 F.3d at 951-55, a case striking down inequitable voter qualification challenges. In Charfauros, an Elections Board regulation created two classes of voters based on party affiliation. Id. at 945. Challenges to the eligibility of one class occurred and were resolved before the election but challenges to the qualifications of the other class were not resolved until after the election, and its votes were not counted. Id. at 946. The Ninth Circuit agreed that the Board's regulation imposed arbitrary and disparate treatment on some citizens and cited Gore for the proposition that "once the legislature prescribes a particular voting procedure, the right to vote in that precise manner is a fundamental right." Id. at 953.
Both Gore and Charfauros involved denial of the right of some individuals to have their votes counted on an equal basis, but neither case applies to the Commission's redistricting efforts here. Gore, 531 U.S. at 100-05; Charfauros, 249 F.3d at 950-55. Neither the Coalition nor Flagstaff claims that Arizona lacks uniform standards to determine if a vote will be counted, as in Gore, 531 U.S. at 105-10, or that the redistricting plans classify voters in a way that
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