One of the redistricting cases to be decided by the Supreme Court in this term involves the question of whether the “one person, one vote” rule requires districts to be based on population or registered voters. It’s not hard to see where this goes. If southern states with racist legislatures can suppress black voting by such devices as passing photo-ID laws and then closing driver’s license offices in black counties, the people living in those counties won’t count for the purpose of drawing district boundaries. Likewise, if a high proportion of blacks have been disenfranchised by criminal convictions and a policy of mass incarceration, they simply don’t exist for representation purposes. Or, in a state like Florida, all it would take is to arbitrarily kick black voters off the voting rolls — a common practice in that state for several elections now. The net result would be that even heavily-black parts of a state could be absorbed into white-voting districts — and blacks could end up with no representation at all. With the conservative-majority Supreme Court we have today, that might be perfectly okay.