With Push for D.C. Vote, Why Utah?

AFTER CLEARING the House last week, the momentum carrying District voting rights legislation across Capitol Hill came to a halt in the Senate on procedural grounds. While it's been expected that lining up 60 votes to avoid a filibuster would be a challenge, the current sticking point is a question of committee jurisdiction. D.C. matters usually are handled out of Sen. Joe Lieberman's Government Affairs and Homeland Security Committee, but as The Post's Mary Beth Sheridan wrote over the weekend, the Senate parliamentarian ruled that the legislation falls under the territory of Montana Sen. Max Baucus' Finance Committee.

But getting to this point has been long road. The most recent legislative push for D.C. voting rights, oddly enough, has its roots in Mormon missionaries, students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and statisticians at the U.S. Census Bureau.

The current voting rights legislation, co-sponsored by Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., is tied to Utah getting an additional seat in the House. Utah is overwhelmingly Republican and the District is overwhelmingly Democratic, thus a partisan balance would be maintained.

But why Utah?

Earlier this decade, Beehive State officials believed that the U.S. Census Bureau undercounted out-of-state Mormon missionaries during the 2000 count and in 2001 sued to have them included, saying that North Carolina benefited from Utah's situation and gained an extra seat in Congress. The U.S. Supreme Court eventually decided not to hear that case, but did consider another one of Utah's challenges: whether certain census estimation practices met constitutionally mandated "actual enumeration." The estimation method in question — "hot-deck imputation," where missing information is substituted with information from similar groups of data — was eventually upheld by the high court in Utah v. Evans in 2002.

Then in 2003, U.S. Census Bureau officials admitted to "a serious overcounting error" in North Carolina, where 2,673 residents in a UNC-Chapel Hill dorm were double-counted. As the Deseret Morning News reported at the time:

At first, Utah officials thought that meant the errors had cost Utah the extra House seat. After all, they had been told that Utah missed that seat by just 857 residents in the original count — and the newly discovered error was much larger than that.

But the reapportionment formulas weren't that simple, Census officials contended. And Utah was, and still is, stuck with three representatives.

So Utah's discontent about its representation on Capitol Hill has helped give the District's quest to secure an equal vote in Congress some traction. But even if the Norton-Davis bill comes up short, Utah will get additional representation in Congress eventually. As The Wall Street Journal's June Kronholz reports today, demographers have new long-term population predictions through the 2030 Census ready, and Utah, like most Western states, will gain at least one or two seats in future reapportionment. The lingering question: Will D.C. residents have a vote on Capitol Hill by 2030?

» "D.C. Vote Bill Jerked From Senate Backer" [WaPo]
» "Evaluating the Impact of Imputations for Item Nonresponse" [National Center for Statistics Education]
» "Census Error Admitted" [Deseret Morning News]
» "Strength in Newcomers' Numbers" [WSJ, subscription req'd]

Photos of the April 16 D.C. voting rights march by Alex Wong/AFP/Getty Images

Posted By Michael Grass at 2:44 PM on April 23, 2007 Tagged in Capitol Hill , D.C. Politics , Free Ride , The District

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