The City of Yakima has latched onto the coat tails of a Texas lawsuit before the nation's highest court seeking to limit the principle of "one person - one vote."
Last February, a Spokane federal judge ordered the city to elect council representatives by district, rather than at large, reasoning that Latino candidates could not gain a political foothold under the at-large system.
Under the new plan, Yakima wound up with two predominantly Latino districts, but in one of them, Latinos of voting age are still in the minority.
The city argues in the Texas case that voting districts should be drawn based on the number of eligible voters, rather than the accepted use of total population. In Yakima, many of the residents in the new districts are not citizens - thus, ineligible to vote.
The city's Seattle lawyer agrees that citizen voting age population estimates are - as he put it - totally inexact. Still, his brief filed with the Supreme Court says the voting age estimates can gauge the severity of electoral inequality among districts better than simple census counts.
Texas and the city of Yakima want justices to strike down or amend a section of the 50-year old Voting Rights Act which led to the one-person, one-vote ruling in 1964.
The election issue has cost the city more than a million dollars in legal fees so far.
The case will be heard by the Supreme Court in October, with a decision expected sometime next summer.
