Brown v. Thomson

In apparent disregard of previous rulings regarding the necessity to apportion using equal population ratios among voting districts, the U.S Supreme Court upheld a Wyoming plan that would exceed acceptable ratio limits. With this decision the Court held that population equality was not the sole determination for establishing voting districts. The Court had affirmed (in previous decisions) that other criteria were acceptable such as maintenance of county boundaries and preservation of political subdivisions. However, the Court ruled that giving an undersized county representation despite lacking sufficient population served a state's interest in providing citizens in all counties representation in a state legislature. The interests of equal representation were not firmly tied to population.

In 1890, when Wyoming became a state, its Constitution provided that each county "shall constitute a senatorial and representative district," and were thus granted the right to have at least one senator and one representative. Another provision of state statute stipulated that senators and representatives would gain their seats according to county population; counties with more inhabitants would have more seats. Dispute arose (in 1981) when the legislature of Wyoming tried to enact a new statute that provided for 64 seats in the Wyoming House of Representatives. With the new statute, state legislators had to reapportion voting districts. Thus began a battle between political parties for political advantage within the state.

In 1980 the state had almost a half million inhabitants. The ideal number of persons per representative in the House of Representatives should have been the population divided by the number of seats stipulated in Wyoming's proposed reapportionment legislation (64)--in this case, 7337 persons per representative. However, the state was divided into 23 counties and so substantial population differences impacted the size of voting districts. The resulting "deviation in population equality" created vastly different numbers of people per representative that was not the same for each county. Under this plan, the average deviation from ideal reapportionment was almost 16 percent (the maximum deviation was almost 89 percent). Further, under the provisions of the proposed statute, even if a county, hypothetically, had no population at all, it was entitled to one representative. Thus the least populous county in the state (3,000 citizens lived in Niobrara County) was given one seat in the House of Representatives. The statute's language also stipulated that if the minimum representation provision was found to be unconstitutional, that county would be combined into one voting district with a neighboring county. (Interestingly, this option would have populated the House of Representatives with only 63 representatives.)

Appellants in this case were members of the League of Women Voters and residents of the seven largest counties in Wyoming. They filed a lawsuit in the Federal District Court on the claim that allocation of one representative to Niobrara County tainted their voting privileges. Because appellants alleged the state of Wyoming was in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, they sought declaratory and injunctive relief (a decision by the court declaring the statute unconstitutional and enjoining its enforcement).