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America’s First Constitutions and Declarations of Rights
teenth, Seventeenth, and Nineteenth Amendments, can mean only one
thing—one person, one vote.’’ The Court has been divided on this issue,
however, and the dissenters have contended that there is no evidence to
support the Court’s new philosophy of political equality. According to
Justice Frankfurter, it was ‘‘the basic English principle of apportioning
representatives among the local governmental entities, towns or counties, rather than among units of approximately equal population,’’ that
took root in the colonies; and Justice Harlan argued that the principle of
‘‘one person, one vote’’ has ‘‘never been the universally accepted political
philosophy in England, the American colonies, or in the United States.’’
Although the deeply rooted tradition of geographical representation
seemed to refute the historical accuracy of the Court’s assertion that the
American political tradition of political equality meant absolute equality
based on numbers alone, Chief Justice Warren insisted nevertheless in
Reynolds v. Sims (1964) that ‘‘Citizens, not history or economic interests,
cast votes. Considerations of area alone provide an insufficient justification for deviations from the equal-population principle. . . . [P]eople, not
land or trees or pastures, vote.’’ The question, however, is not who votes,
but who and what interests legislators are supposed to represent.
Whatever the merits of the Supreme Court’s view of the matter, it
seems clear that the principle of republicanism which the English settlers
brought with them to North America was only modestly changed during
the next century and a half of colonial government. In every colony, local
units of government, whether townships and villages or citie ́