This article published in the Washington Post is written by Jowei Chen and Nicholas Stephanopoulos:

The gerrymandering wars are about to resume. Over the next year, every state in the country will have to redraw its congressional and legislative districts. In anticipation of redistricting, Republicans are eyeing a new tactic: For decades, states have equalized the numbers of people their districts contain. But the GOP is now pushing to equalize districts’ citizen voting-age populations instead. Under this approach, noncitizens and children would be invisible for remapping purposes. Only adult citizens would count.

Republicans think that by omitting non-adult citizens from districts’ populations, they would slash the representation of minorities and Democrats. Their logic goes like this: At present, many districts with non-White or Democratic legislators have relatively low proportions of adult citizens. So these districts would have to grow in size — and shrink in number — to acquire enough adult citizens to hit their new population targets. Conversely, many districts with White or Republican legislators have higher shares of adult citizens. These districts would shed some of their residents into adjacent districts in a world where adult citizens, not people, had to be equalized. These dispersed voters would tilt their new districts in a conservative direction.

But are these forecasts accurate? Remarkably, no one knows. To date, no academic study has examined the consequences of changing the unit of apportionment from all people to adult citizens only. In a forthcoming article, the two of us investigate this topic for the first time. Our findings confirm some — but not all — of progressives’ fears about the effects of switching the apportionment base. Minority representation would drop sharply if states equalized adult citizens rather than people. But the partisan balance of power would be largely unaffected.

Continue reading this story here.