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Full-Text Articles in Election Law
One Person, How Many Votes? Measuring Prison Malapportionment, Ian Bollag-Miller
One Person, How Many Votes? Measuring Prison Malapportionment, Ian Bollag-Miller
Fordham Law Voting Rights and Democracy Forum
“One-person, one-vote” is a fundamental principle of democracy. In practice, however, vote distribution among population groups is often less than equal. Even in established democracies, prison malapportionment—the distribution of legislative seats by counting incarcerated people in their prisons’ districts rather than their home districts—is one example of a practice that distorts voter representation. Prison malapportionment allows less populous districts that house prisons to maximize their voting power at the expense of more densely populated districts from which many incarcerated people previously lived. While there has been significant scholarship on the causes and effects of prison malapportionment, there is no standard …