Opinion ID: 4521181
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: One Person, One Vote Claim

Text: We begin by assessing whether Appellants' allegations plausibly support a claim that the WTA system violates the one person, one vote principle embedded in the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. As an initial matter, Appellants challenge the district court's determination that the Supreme Court's summary affirmance in Williams is controlling. Next, Appellants defend their equal protection claim by splitting it into two theories. First, based on the contents of footnote 12 in Gray, 372 U.S. at 381 n.125 -- which Appellants term the case's second, independent holding -- they argue that the WTA system discards their votes for a non-majority candidate at the first step of a two-step presidential election. Second, they posit that the WTA system could alternatively be viewed as an at-large election for a multimember district of electors, which unconstitutionally dilutes the strength of their votes. As we will explain, we reject these contentions. 5 Specifically, Appellants point to the language in footnote 12, which states that in the context of Georgia's county-unit system (which we will later describe in detail), the weighting of the votes would continue, even if unit votes were allocated strictly in proportion to population because the votes for the candidate who loses the county popular vote would be worth nothing and [would] be[] counted only for the purpose of being discarded. Gray, 372 U.S. at 381 n.12. -23-
According to the constitutional blueprint for implementing the Electoral College, the States alone (through their legislatures) possess the power to determine the manner of appointing presidential electors. See U.S. Const. art. II, § 1, cl. 2; id. amend. XII. The text of the Elector Clause reads: Each state shall appoint in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress . . . . Id. art. II, § 1, cl. 2. In interpreting the bounds of the Elector Clause, the Supreme Court has stated that [t]he state legislature's power to select the manner for appointing electors is plenary. Bush, 531 U.S. at 104 (citing McPherson, 146 U.S. at 35). It is precisely for this reason that the Constitution does not prescribe or endorse any selection method in particular. See McPherson, 146 U.S. at 28 (The final result [of the constitutional convention] . . . reconciled contrariety of views by leaving it to the state legislatures to appoint directly by joint ballot or concurrent separate action, or through popular election by districts or by general ticket, or as otherwise might be directed.); see also id. at 27 (The constitution does not provide that the appointment of electors shall be by popular vote, nor that the electors shall be voted for upon a general ticket, -24- nor that the majority of those who exercise the elective franchise can alone choose the electors.). State legislatures have utilized a variety of appointment mechanisms since the framing of the Constitution, but in recent memory, [h]istory has . . . favored the voter. Bush, 531 U.S. at 104.6 Of course, the hand that giveth, also taketh away (if it so desires). See id. (citing McPherson, 146 U.S. at 35) (The State . . . after granting the franchise in the special context of Article II, can take back the power to appoint electors.).7 Plenary as a state legislature's power to dictate the manner of appointing presidential electors may be, it is not beyond judicial review. On the contrary, it is always subject to the 6 Only Nebraska and Maine have adopted an alternative to the WTA system. They employ a hybrid version of district voting. See Me. Rev. Stat. Ann. tit. 21-A, § 805.2 (2020); Neb. Rev. Stat. § 32-714 (2019). Under this modern iteration, the candidate who wins the statewide popular vote receives the two at-large electoral votes (i.e., the two votes each state is entitled to for its senatorial representation), and the candidate who wins a plurality of the votes in each congressional district receives one electoral vote for that district (i.e., two in Maine and three in Nebraska). 7 For example, in advance of the 1800 presidential election, the Massachusetts legislature took back the appointment power from its citizens and picked the electors itself. See Neal R. Peirce, The People's President: The Electoral College in American History and the Direct-Vote Alternative 67 (1968). Historically, the Massachusetts legislature experimented quite frequently before settling on the WTA system. Between 1804 and 1820 alone, Massachusetts rotated through the general ticket system (1804), a joint ballot of the legislature (1808, 1816), and the congressional district system (1812, 1820), only to return to the general ticket system in 1824. See McPherson, 146 U.S. at 32. -25- limitation that [it] may not be exercised in a way that violates other specific provisions of the Constitution. Rhodes, 393 U.S. at 29; see also Williams, 288 F. Supp. at 626 (noting that in order to pass muster, the manner of appointment must itself be free of Constitutional infirmity). The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is one such well-established limitation (the First Amendment is another, as we will explain later). See Rhodes, 393 U.S. at 29 ([N]o State can pass a law regulating elections that violates the Fourteenth Amendment[] . . . .); Wesberry v. Sanders, 376 U.S. 1, 17-18 (1964) (Our Constitution leaves no room for classification of people in a way that unnecessarily abridges [their] right [to vote].). The Equal Protection Clause guarantees that the government will not treat those who are similarly situated differently. In re Subpoena to Witzel, 531 F.3d 113, 118 (1st Cir. 2008); see U.S. Const. amend. XIV, § 1 ([N]or shall any State . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.). In the context of voting rights, [h]aving once granted the right to vote on equal terms, the State may not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person's vote over that of another. Bush, 531 U.S. at 104—05 (citing Harper v. Va. Bd. of Elections, 383 U.S. 663, 665 (1966)).8 8 Importantly for our analysis, citizens do not have a federal -26- In this manner, the Equal Protection Clause safeguards the equal weight accorded to each vote and the equal dignity owed to each voter. Id. at 104. This is the meaning of one person, one vote, a steadfast democratic principle which the Supreme Court articulated in Gray, 372 U.S. at 381. At its core, the precept stands for the idea that every voter is equal to every other voter in his State. Id. at 380. In other words, once states establish a geographical unit for electing a political representative, all who participate in the election are to have an equal vote--whatever their race, whatever their sex, whatever their occupation, whatever their income, and wherever their home may be in that geographical unit. Id. at 379; see also Burns v. Richardson, 384 U.S. 73, 88 (1966) (recognizing that electoral systems cannot be used to cancel out the voting strength of racial or political elements of the population (quoting Fortson v. Dorsey, 379 U.S. 433, 439 (1965))). One-person, one-vote jurisprudence thus requires states to [e]nsure that each person's vote counts as much, insofar as it [i]s practicable, as any other person's. Hadley v. Junior Coll. constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States unless and until the state legislature chooses a statewide election as the means to implement its power to appoint members of the electoral college. Bush, 531 U.S. at 104 (citing U.S. Const. Art. II, § 1). -27- Dist. of Metro. Kan. City, 397 U.S. 50, 54 (1970). [T]he crucial consideration is the right of each qualified voter to participate on an equal footing in the election process. Id. at 55. As the Supreme Court has recognized, [t]he right to vote can be affected by a dilution of voting power as well as by an absolute prohibition on casting a ballot. Shaw v. Reno, 509 U.S. 630, 640-41 (1993) (alteration in original) (emphasis omitted) (quoting Allen v. State Bd. of Elections, 393 U.S. 544, 569 (1969)); see also Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533, 555 (1964) ([T]he right of suffrage can be denied by a debasement or dilution of the weight of a citizen's vote just as effectively as by wholly prohibiting the free exercise of the franchise.). Along these lines, one's right to vote is impaired to an unconstitutional degree when the weight of one's vote is substantially diluted in comparison with the votes of citizens living elsewhere in the state. See, e.g., Moore v. Ogilvie, 394 U.S. 814, 819 (1969) (The idea that one group can be granted greater voting strength than another is hostile to the one [person], one vote basis of our representative government.). Therefore, now that Massachusetts has decided to let its citizens choose by ballot which presidential candidate Massachusetts will support with its electoral votes, that balloting is subject to the one person, one vote principle -28- embedded in the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Appellants' challenge to Massachusetts's WTA system for selecting presidential electors on equal protection grounds is not the first of its kind. In Williams, Virginia voters challenged the Commonwealth of Virginia's use of an analogous WTA system known as the unit rule. See 288 F. Supp. at 624, 626 (considering whether Article II, Section 1 considered alone or with Constitutional safeguards, permits the selection of the electors by a general election in which the entire electorate of the State may collectively vote at one time upon all of the electors).9 After granting certiorari, the Supreme Court summarily affirmed the decision of the three-judge panel of the district court in a 9 There is historical irony in the link between the challenges to Virginia's and Massachusetts's WTA systems. As is now legend, after John Adams (of Massachusetts) defeated Thomas Jefferson (of Virginia) in the 1796 presidential election by a three-vote margin, Virginia switched from the district system (which it had used in the first three presidential elections) to the general ticket system (whereby electors are selected on a winner-take-all basis by a statewide popular vote) to ensure that all of its twenty-one electoral votes would go to a single party's candidate. See Peirce, supra note 7, at 64-66; see also Letter from Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe (Jan. 12, 1800) in 9 The Works of Thomas Jefferson, 90 (Paul Leicester Ford, ed. 1904) ([All agree that an election by districts would be best, if it could be general; but while [ten] states ch[oose] either by their legislatures or by a general ticket, it is folly [and] worse than folly for the other [six] not to do it.). -29- per curiam opinion and then denied a motion for rehearing. See Williams, 393 U.S. 320, reh'g denied, 393 U.S. 1112 (1969) (per curiam). Given the clear overlap of issues, a citation to Williams would, in our view, decide the present case but for the fact that Williams remains good law as a one-line summary affirmance by the Supreme Court instead of a merits opinion. We thus echo the district court in the case at hand: the Supreme Court's summary affirmance is not necessarily an endorsement of the three-judge panel's reasoning. See Lyman, 352 F. Supp. 3d at 86 (citing Mandel, 432 U.S. at 176). To that end, summary actions are meant to be understood as applying principles established by prior decisions to the particular facts involved and not as breaking new ground. Mandel, 432 U.S. at 176. Nevertheless [t]hey do prevent lower courts from coming to opposite conclusions on the precise issues presented and necessarily decided by those actions. Id.; see also Anderson v. Celebrezze, 460 U.S. 780, 784 n.5 (1983). For substantially the same reasons articulated by the district court below (with a few tweaks), we agree that Williams requires the dismissal of Appellants' equal protection claim at this stage. Williams decides the core equal protection issue presented by this appeal: whether Massachusetts's WTA system -30- undermines the one person, one vote principle.10 The Williams plaintiffs were ten Virginia voters who shared the conviction that Virginia's unit rule undermined the original intent of the Elector Clause that electors ought to be chosen on a district-by-district basis like congressional representatives -- a sentiment which Appellants in this case share. See Williams, 288 F. Supp. at 625; Opening Brief of Plaintiffs-Appellants at 8, Lyman v. Baker, No. 18-2235 (1st Cir. Apr. 17, 2019) (WTA, which in modern times makes the role of Electors purely ministerial, is inconsistent 10 In the aforementioned parallel case, the Fifth Circuit held that the Supreme Court's summary affirmance in Williams required the dismissal of the appellants' equal protection challenge to Texas's WTA system, rejecting along the way all of the same arguments that Appellants make here as to why Williams does not control. See League of Latin Am. Citizens, 951 F.3d at 314-317. Additionally, we note -- as the district court did -- that the Fourth and Ninth Circuits have also considered and rejected equal protection challenges to WTA systems. See Williams v. North Carolina, No. 3:17-cv-00265, 2017 WL 4935858, at  (W.D.N.C. Oct. 31, 2017) (rejecting challenge to North Carolina's WTA system as decisively foreclosed by binding precedent), aff'd sub nom. Williams v. N.C. State Bd. of Elections, 719 F. App'x 256 (mem) (4th Cir. 2018); Conant v. Brown, 248 F. Supp. 3d 1014, 1025 (D. Or. 2017) (holding challenge to Oregon's WTA system to be defeated because Williams is still good law), aff'd, 726 F. App'x 611 (9th Cir. 2018). Other lower courts have reached similar results too. See, e.g., Schweikert v. Herring, No. 16-cv-00072, 2016 WL 7046845, at  (W.D. Va. Dec. 2, 2016) (dismissing challenge to Virginia's WTA system because [t]he precise issue contained in [the] complaint was . . . dismissed, and affirmed summarily in Williams); Hitson v. Baggett, 446 F. Supp. 674, 676 (M.D. Ala.) (dismissing challenge to the statewide and at-large features of Alabama's WTA system), aff'd without opinion, 580 F.2d 1051 (5th Cir. 1978), cert. denied, 439 U.S. 1129 (1979). -31- with [the original] design.). Seeking declaratory and injunctive relief -- just as Appellants did below -- they challenged Virginia's WTA system vis-à-vis three causes of action, the second of which presented the precise issue raised by Appellants. Williams, 288 F. Supp. at 623-24. Specifically, the Williams plaintiffs alleged that the general ticket method violates the 'one-person, one-vote' principle of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, i.e., the weight of each citizen's vote must be substantially equal to that of every other citizen. Id. at 624 (citing Gray, 372 U.S. at 381). The district court noted that plaintiffs imputed unfairness to the plan because it g[ave] the choice of all of the electors to the statewide plurality of those voting in the elections -- 'winner take all' -- and accord[ed] no representation among the electors to the minority of the voters. Id. at 623. Deferential to the Elector Clause's broad grant of authority to the States, the three-judge panel in Williams rejected the equal protection claim because it saw nothing in [Virginia's] unit rule offensive to the Constitution. Id. at 627. In fact, to reach its decision on the exact issue presented here, the district court considered some of the same possible objectionable results of the WTA system that Appellants allege in their complaint. Id. Namely, this list included the risk of minority -32- presidents (i.e., when a candidate wins a majority of the electoral votes despite losing the popular vote), and most importantly, the disenfranchisement defect (i.e., that the unit system extinguishes the voice of up to 49 percent of a State's voters by allowing State majorities to speak for them). Id. Ultimately, the Williams court concluded: [I]t is difficult to equate the deprivations imposed by the unit rule with the denial of privileges outlawed by the one-person, one-vote doctrine or banned by Constitutional mandates of protection. In the selection of electors the rule does not in any way denigrate the power of one citizen's ballot and heighten the influence of another's vote. Admittedly, once the electoral slate is chosen, it speaks only for the element with the largest number of votes. This is in a sense discrimination against the minority voters, but in a democratic society the majority must rule, unless the discrimination is invidious. No such evil has been made manifest here. Every citizen is offered equal suffrage and no deprivation of the franchise is suffered by anyone. Id. Appellants first argue that the district court erroneously relied on Williams in dismissing their equal protection claim because Williams never addressed their exact contention that WTA discards votes at the first step of a two-step election as condemned in Gray footnote 12. Appellants emphasize the narrowness of the deference we ought to afford summary orders and propose that we only adhere to them when the factual and legal issues presented are identical. At the same time, Appellants -33- also maintain that the district court misunderstood their argument as being rooted in . . . factual distinctions between Virginia's and Massachusetts's WTA systems. Although they maintain that the factual differences they alleged are not meaningless, Appellants note that their more basic point is that their claim evades Williams's limited wingspan because it turns on Gray's second holding in footnote 12, which neither the Williams court nor its plaintiffs endeavored to cite or distinguish. However, Williams did not, as Appellants assert, only consider the WTA system as a one-step election for a state-level body. In fact, the two-step election critique (i.e., that the WTA system causes individual votes to lose their effect on the outcome at a preliminary stage in the counting, in the sense that those votes are not tallied when determining the winner on the national stage) made more than a mere cameo. See Williams, 288 F. Supp. at 627. The court expressly weighed the issue, but it ultimately rejected the two-step critique because it was more persuaded by the notion that [b]y voting, the minority party voters . . . set a figure which must be matched and exceeded by opposing voters before the State's electoral vote bloc is awarded to the opponent. Id. at 627 (quoting Staff of S. Subcomm. on Const. Amends., 87th Cong., Memorandum on the Electoral College 23 (Oct. 10, 1961)). Along these lines, the applicability of the -34- decision in Gray, as well as other relevant one person, one vote cases, was directly at issue in Williams. In fact, the core equal protection holding that the general ticket does not come within the brand of [the one person, one vote] decisions is a direct application of Gray's principles regarding the constitutionality of the unit rule. Id. at 626. Therefore, the absence in Williams of a citation to Gray's footnote 12, in our view, does not place Appellants' case outside the precise issues presented and necessarily decided by the summary action. Mandel, 432 U.S. at 176. Next, Appellants allege that Williams does not control the outcome of this case under their multimember district vote dilution theory either (i.e., that by turning the selection of Massachusetts's electors into an election for a eleven-member district, the WTA system dilutes the strength of Appellants' votes for non-majority party candidates). In support, they assert that White v. Regester, 412 U.S. 755 (1973), and Bush v. Gore, represent key doctrinal shifts in vote dilution law, which undermine the precedential force of Williams's summary order as applied to their one person, one vote claim. For the following reasons, this too does not persuade. First, the comparison with White is inapposite. Appellants read White as giving teeth to the principle that -35- at-large elections can violate the Fourteenth Amendment if they operate to dilute the influence of political minorities. Thus, without the benefit of cases like White, they argue, the Williams court could not have properly considered the potential for a voting system to dilute votes in an election for a multimember body. However, to characterize White as applying to the dilution of the voting strength of political minorities through the use of multimember districts is to misread its second holding, which stemmed from the Court's concern that multimember districts [were] being used invidiously to cancel out or minimize the voting strength of racial groups. White, 412 U.S. at 765 (emphasis added) (citing Whitcomb v. Chavis, 403 U.S. 124 (1971)). Specifically, the court in White confronted the reapportionment plan for the Texas House of Representatives in Dallas and Bexar Counties, where African-American and Mexican-American communities had been effectively excluded or removed from participation in the [political] process in any reliable and meaningful manner for many years on end. Id. at 767, 769. In order to bring [those] communit[ies] into the full stream of political life of the county and State, drawing single-member districts was required to remedy 'the effects of past and present [racial] discrimination.' Id. at 769. Appellants are not wrong that White, as well as the line of subsequent precedent to which they -36- cite,11 developed voting rights case law with respect to the use of multimember districts; however, they stretch reason too far in characterizing those cases as forming a doctrine regarding diluting the voting strength of political minorities in general terms, when the clear focus of those cases was discrimination against racial minorities. Thus, White does not undermine the precedential force of Williams.12 11 See, e.g., Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U.S. 30, 47 (1986); United States v. Blaine Cty., 363 F.3d 897, 916 (9th Cir. 2004); NAACP v. Gadsden Cty. Sch. Bd., 691 F.2d 978, 983 (11th Cir. 1982); Montes v. City of Yakima, 40 F. Supp. 3d 1377, 1414 (E.D. Wash. 2014); Citizens for a Better Gretna v. City of Gretna, 636 F. Supp. 1113, 1135 (E.D. La. 1986), aff'd, 834 F.2d 496 (5th Cir. 1987), cert. denied, 492 U.S. 905 (1989). 12 Appellants also take a related historical tack. At the time of its decision, the Williams court noted that Congress had expressly countenanced state-wide at-large elections of congressional representatives. 288 F. Supp. at 628. However, Appellants submit that, motivated by the fear that Southern states would utilize multimember districts to dilute the voting strength of racial minorities (as exemplified by the Texas counties in White), Congress changed the law to require that states with two or more representatives use single-member districts. See 2 U.S.C. § 2c. That change went into effect beginning with the ninetyfirst congress, which convened the year after Williams was decided. In our view, this does not alter the doctrinal landscape, for as the district court in the present case noted, multimember districts are not per se unconstitutional. White, 412 U.S. at 765. In any event, the court in Williams seemed to be acutely aware of this because, in the same breath that it acknowledged congressional approval of multimember districts at the time, it cited the aforementioned amendment as to future elections. See 288 F. Supp. at 624. Moreover, what is true for the election of U.S. Representatives (a process over which Congress retains oversight per Article I, section 4), is not necessarily true for the appointment of presidential electors (a process over which, as previously discussed, Congress does not retain any oversight). -37- Second, turning to Bush, Appellants train their eyes on the Williams court's reliance on the invidiousness as a prerequisite for an equal protection violation, which they argue has been overcome by doctrinal developments. They ascribe particular meaning to the fact that in Bush, the Supreme Court found that Florida's recount procedures violated the one person, one vote principle because they resulted in arbitrary and disparate treatment of Florida citizens' votes without adding to that finding any discussion whatsoever of whether such discrimination was invidious. Thus, in Appellants' view, [b]ecause invidiousness is not a requirement of the present challenge it follows that Williams cannot have resolved [their] challenge based on a legal standard that no longer controls. In our estimation, this misses the mark for two reasons. First and foremost, we decline to read Bush, which expressly states that it is limited to the present circumstances (and fairly unique circumstances at that), 531 U.S. at 109, beyond its facts as overturning Williams, especially because it does not expressly discuss the selection of presidential electors. See Shalala v. Ill. Council on Long Term Care, Inc., 529 U.S. 1, 18 (2000)([The Supreme Court] does not normally overturn, or so dramatically limit, earlier authority sub silentio . . . .). Next, we do not understand Bush to definitively alter -38- the doctrinal requirements of one person, one vote claims in every instance. In Bush, Florida's court-ordered recount of ballots cast in the 2000 presidential election violated the Equal Protection Clause because the standards for accepting or rejecting contested ballots might vary not only from county to county but indeed within a single county from one recount team to another. 531 U.S. at 106. This lack of uniform statewide standards for determining what is a legal vote violated Florida's obligation to avoid arbitrary and disparate treatment of the members of its electorate. Id. at 105, 110. In Bush, the absence of uniform standards indicated to the Court that there was no rhyme or reason for the arbitrary and disparate treatment of ballots, and therefore, an inquiry into invidiousness would have been out of place. In any event, while proving the invidiousness of an election system may not always be required to establish a valid equal protection claim, the Supreme Court has factored a showing of invidiousness into the prima facie case for violations of the Equal Protection Clause in the voting rights context both before Williams and after Bush. See, e.g., Harris v. Ariz. Indep. Redistricting Comm'n, 136 S. Ct. 1301, 1307 (2016) ([M]inor deviations from mathematical equality do not, by themselves, make out a prima facie case of invidious discrimination under the -39- Fourteenth Amendment . . . . (citation and quotation marks omitted)); Dusch v. Davis, 387 U.S. 112, 116 (1967) ([T]he constitutional test under the Equal Protection Clause is whether there is an 'invidious' discrimination.). In our view, the larger point is that invidiousness and arbitrary and disparate treatment are simply not mutually exclusive means of establishing the prima facie case for one person, one vote violations. The Supreme Court itself (as the district court here rightly noted) has recognized as much. See, e.g., Roman v. Sincock, 377 U.S. 695, 710 (1964) (explaining that the Equal Protection Clause requires faithful adherence to a plan of population-based representation, and that minor deviations are only permissible if free from any taint of arbitrariness or discrimination (emphasis added)); cf. Clements v. Fashing, 457 U.S. 957, 967 (1982) (Classification is the essence of all legislation, and only those classifications which are invidious, arbitrary, or irrational offend the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. (emphasis added)). Therefore, we do not read Bush as ushering in the sweeping change that Appellants assert would require us to put Williams aside. Accordingly, we concur with the district court that the Supreme Court's summary affirmance in Williams controls the outcome of the case at hand and compels the dismissal of Appellants' equal protection claim. -40-
Even if Williams were not binding, we would agree that Appellants still fail to state a one person, one vote claim as a matter of law. Appellants' equal protection claim does not withstand scrutiny because the WTA system does not deny Appellants equal participation in the political process by, for example, unevenly counting their votes or favoring or disfavoring any particular set of voters. Drawing from Gray, Appellants' first equal protection theory is that the WTA system severely burdens their right to an equally weighted vote by discarding their votes for president at the first step of a two-step presidential election. Appellants' second theory is that the WTA system unconstitutionally dilutes their votes even if viewed as an election for a multimember, state-level body of electors instead of the first step in a two-step presidential election. The allegations in the complaint do not demonstrate that the WTA system by . . . arbitrary and disparate treatment, value[s] one person's vote over that of another, Bush, 531 U.S. at 104-05, nor do Appellants plausibly allege that the WTA system infringes upon the right of voters to participate on an equal footing in the election process, Hadley, 397 U.S. at 55. The WTA system does not treat any particular group of Massachusetts voters differently at all -- it does not inherently favor or disfavor -41- voters from any particular group (political or otherwise). In Massachusetts, registered voters cast their ballot for president and vice president vis-à-vis a slate of presidential electors on Election Day. After the polls close, Massachusetts counts the votes, according each vote equal weight, and then awards its electors to the party whose candidate wins the highest number of votes. That the candidate who loses the popular vote is entitled to zero electors (irrespective of his or her political party) does not in our view signify that the votes for that candidate have been rendered meaningless. It merely indicates that the tally of votes for that candidate was surpassed by the tally for the winning candidate. See, e.g., City of Mobile v. Bolden, 446 U.S. 55, 77 n.24, 79 (1980) (holding that although the Equal Protection Clause does confer a right to participate in elections on an equal basis with other qualified voters, it does not entail a right to have one's candidate prevail or guarantee[] proportional representation). Moreover, that one political party has prevailed in the past eight election cycles (or thirty-two years) does not necessarily signify the unequal treatment of political parties either. A fuller picture of Massachusetts electoral history suggests that the Republican Party, for example, has enjoyed periods of sustained success at the ballot box in both presidential -42- and gubernatorial elections (the latter overlapping with the eight election cycles decried by Appellants). Thus, we find no difficulty completing the logical progression articulated by the Supreme Court in McPherson, where it upheld Michigan's use of the congressional district system for appointing electors against a constitutional challenge (the first of its kind). If presidential electors are appointed by the legislatures, no discrimination is made; if they are elected in districts where each citizen has an equal right to vote, the same as any other citizen has, no discrimination is made. McPherson, 146 U.S. at 40. Likewise, if presidential electors are appointed on a WTA basis, and every citizen has an equal right to vote, no discrimination is made. Because that is plainly the case in Massachusetts, we do not disturb the ruling below on this point. Appellants do not allege any invidiousness about the WTA system in Massachusetts either. While Appellants maintain that they need not allege invidiousness to state an equal protection claim, they nevertheless cite to historical evidence to illustrate that the origins of the WTA can be traced to the realpolitik between Republicans and Federalists in the early days of the republic. That the initial design of the WTA system may have contemplated the consolidation of electoral power in the majority party at any given time does not necessarily make it invidiously -43- discriminatory. The United States' system of representative democracy was built on compromises that sought to promote geographic equality by way of numerical balancing acts like the Electoral College and equal representation in the Senate. We recognize that Appellants do not challenge the numerical inequality that inheres in the Elector Clause vis-à-vis its interrelatedness with the Electoral College (which effectively gives highly populated states fewer electoral votes per capita than sparsely populated states). However, we note this interconnectedness as a means of rejecting the contention that the origins of the WTA system irrevocably plague it with invidiousness. To begin, Appellants build their case on the assertion that the district court erroneously ignored Gray's second, independent holding in rejecting their analogy to the two-step system that the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional in that case. Gray involved a challenge to the Georgia Democratic Party's use of a county-unit system to conduct primaries for U.S. Senator and statewide offices, including for governor. See Gray, 372 U.S. at 370. Under Georgia's variation -- which the state legislature had actually amended during the course of the litigation -- the primary was divided into two steps with two metrics: units and votes. See id. at 372. Counties were allotted two units for the first 15,000 residents. See id. Counties then gained an additional -44- unit for each of the next intervals of 5,000, 10,000, and 15,000 residents, and thereafter, an additional two units for each additional interval of 30,000 residents. See id. To win the nomination in the first leg, a candidate needed to receive a majority of both the county units and the popular vote (with a majority of the popular vote breaking a tie in unit votes). See id. However, the state held a second run-off primary if no candidate won both the majority of the units and popular votes. See id. To win in the second leg, a candidate simply needed to amass the highest number of units. See id. Because the county-unit system weight[ed] the rural vote more heavily than the urban vote and weight[ed] some small rural counties heavier than other larger rural counties, the Supreme Court struck it down on equal protection grounds. Id. at 379. In terms of the Equal Protection Clause, the Court held that the transgression was geographic discrimination: residents of the smallest rural counties had a disproportionally higher number of unit votes in comparison to their population. See id. Thus, drawing upon the conception of political equality from the Declaration of Independence, to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, to the Fifteenth, Seventeenth, and Nineteenth Amendments, the Court gave body to the principle of one person, one vote. Id. at 381. -45- Appellants contend that the district court understandably latched onto this aspect of the holding in Gray at the expense of its second holding, which in Appellants' view, is of greater relevance to the outcome of their case. Footnote 12 of Gray states: The county unit system, even in its amended form . . . would allow the candidate winning the popular vote in the county to have the entire unit vote of that county. Hence the weighting of the votes would continue, even if unit votes were allocated strictly in proportion to population. Thus if a candidate won 6,000 of 10,000 votes in a particular county, he would get the entire unit vote, the 4,000 other votes for a different candidate being worth nothing and being counted only for the purpose of being discarded. Id. at 381 n.12. To confirm the weight of the footnote, Appellants cite to the Supreme Court's statement in Gordon v. Lance, that in Gray . . . we h[e]ld that the county-unit system would have been defective even if unit votes were allocated strictly in proportion to population. 403 U.S. 1, 4 (1971). Although the analogy between Georgia's county-unit system and the WTA system has intuitive appeal, Gray does not in our view give wings to Appellants' claim. We do not understand footnote 12 to invalidate the use of the unit rule in the context of selecting presidential electors. After all, the Court in Gray was careful to offer something of a disclaimer that analogies to the electoral college . . . and to other phases of the problems of representation in state or federal legislatures or conventions are -46- inapposite. 372 U.S. at 378 (emphasis added) (footnote omitted). Appellants implicitly hang their hats on the Court's subsequent comment that the Constitution's validat[ion] of the inherent numerical inequality in the Electoral College implied nothing about the use of an analogous system by a State in a statewide election. Id. But that is precisely what separates Georgia's use of a county unit system in a statewide primary election from Massachusetts's use of the WTA system in the presidential election. Whatever the added effect of footnote 12, the core concern in Gray was that the county-unit system perpetuated a form of geographic discrimination within the state of Georgia that magnified the voice of rural voters.13 In other words, the equal protection violation stemmed from the observation that every voter in the Democratic primary was not equal to every other voter in his State. Id. at 380. Moreover, even in recognizing the point raised in footnote 12 that Georgia's county unit system would have been defective even if unit votes were allocated strictly in proportion to population, Gordon -- the case to which Appellants cite -- noted that the defect to which footnote 12 referred 13 Although not explicitly phrased in such terms, the underlying concern before the Court in Gray was that the geographic discrimination in Georgia was particularly invidious because the favored rural counties had significantly lower populations of racial minorities than urban counties. -47- continued to be geographic discrimination. 403 U.S. at 4-5. This confirms that the discarding of the votes was never the core focus of the holding. Rather, it was the disparate treatment that ran afoul of the Fourteenth Amendment because the [v]otes for the losing candidates, as Georgia weighed them, were discarded solely because of the county where [they] were cast. Id. at 5. The same cannot be said of votes for losing candidates in Massachusetts. Massachusetts's WTA system is not materially analogous because the role of counties in Georgia and the role of states under the federal Constitution materially differ. Counties qua counties in Georgia did not have the power to select Georgia's governor. Rather, the voters chose the governor by ballot; hence any attempt to use two steps to weight those votes differently raised equal protection issues. States, by contrast, have the power to select the electors who vote for president. And under the Constitution, a state can decide for itself, without any plebiscite, whether to cast its full support behind a single candidate. Massachusetts decided to do so. That left only a single decision for voters: which candidate? On that decision, Massachusetts chose to turn to its voters, conducting a single, one-step electoral process just as it does to select a governor. In short, on the question assigned to voters in Massachusetts, -48- there is only a one-step vote, with no dilution. Moreover, the Constitution directly addresses this issue in a manner that shows no inkling of requiring a plebiscite. For instance, in the event that the electoral vote is not decisive, the vote goes to the House of Representatives to break the tie in the Electoral College, with each state having one, winner-take-all vote. See U.S. Const. amend. XII ([I]n choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote . . . .). Furthermore, the very use of electoral votes itself rejects one person, one vote as a requirement in the selection of electors unless one contends that electoral votes need be subdivided into fractions. Thus, in Vermont, for example, even under Appellants' proposed method of voting, there will be unequal votes unless a candidate gets exactly zero or one third of the votes with the remainder all to the other. Accordingly, Appellants' two-step theory does not hold weight even factoring in the contents of footnote 12 in Gray. Moving to Appellants' second equal protection theory asserting vote dilution in a multimember district of electors, we find that it too fails to carry the day. Appellants contend that even if viewed as a single-step election for a slate of electors, the WTA system severely burdens their Fourteenth Amendment rights -49- by canceling out their votes for Electors through an at-large . . . election that systematically ensures zero representation in Massachusetts' Electoral College delegation. Their argument is premised on the original intent that the Electoral College would function as a deliberative body. See McPherson, 146 U.S. at 36 ([I]t was supposed that the electors would exercise a reasonable independence and fair judgment in the selection of the chief executive, but . . . . the original expectation may be said to have been frustrated.). By this logic, Massachusetts denies equal representation to the citizens who vote for minority party candidates because the WTA system ensures that they will not be represented by any electors in the Electoral College. Appellants thus argue, relying on Burns, 384 U.S. at 88, that the WTA system 'cancel[s] out the voting strength' of minority voters in order to consolidate power in the hands of the plurality. There is no question that multimember apportionment schemes can violate the dictates of the Equal Protection Clause if (by design or impact) they dilute the voting strength of political elements of the voting population. Burns, 384 U.S. at 88; see also Allen, 393 U.S. at 569.14 However, the use of a WTA system 14 Functionally, multimember districts are those in which the people elect multiple candidates to represent a single consolidated district based on a plurality voting system. -50- does not necessarily render a multimember apportionment scheme unconstitutional. In Whitcomb v. Chavis, for example, the Supreme Court considered an equal protection challenge to Indiana's use of multimember districts for its state general assembly elections amidst criticism of, inter alia, their winner-take-all aspects. 403 U.S. at 158-59. However, the Supreme Court ultimately rejected the argument that use of such multimember districts, which were decided by plurality vote, violated the Equal Protection Clause simply because the supporters of losing candidates have no legislative seats assigned to them. Id. at 160; see also id. at 154-55 (The mere fact that one interest group . . . has found itself outvoted and without legislative seats . . . provides no basis for invoking constitutional remedies where . . . there is no indication that this segment of the population is being denied access to the political system.). We see a useful parallel to the impact of the WTA system in Massachusetts. If the WTA system could indeed be characterized as a multimember district -- which we are not certain that it can, given the largely ministerial role of electors today -- voters for minority candidates do not suffer a violation of their equal protection rights simply because their preferred candidate did not See Whitcomb, 403 U.S. at 134 n.11, 160. -51- prevail after having an equal and fair opportunity to compete in the statewide election. Thus, while Appellants are [a]rguably . . . without representation since the [candidates] they voted for have been defeated, that is the nature of the head-on races between candidates of two or more parties that defines typical American legislative elections. Id. at 153. In that sense, the WTA system is no different from any other election system decided by plurality voting. We do not say that votes cast for the losing candidate in any other such election are discarded because the winner belongs to a different political party or because those who voted for the losing candidate disapprove of the winner's political agenda. Thus, to the extent that Appellants challenge the validity of plurality voting in general through their equal protection claim, they do not prevail. Whitcomb, of course, recognizes that multimember districts may be subject to challenge under certain circumstances of vote dilution. Id. at 143 (citing Fortson, 379 U.S. at 439). The Court added to its holding that the tendency of a multimember district to have such an effect is enhanced when the district is large and elects a substantial proportion of the seats in either house of a bicameral legislature . . . or if it lacks provision for at-large candidates running from particular geographical subdistricts. Id. at 143-44 (citing Burns, 384 U.S. -52- at 88). Appellants submit that the use of the WTA system in Massachusetts aptly illustrates the dilutive characteristics that were absent in Whitcomb. Under their analogy, Massachusetts's unicameral body of eleven electors is the district, and since one hundred percent (a substantial proportion) of the seats, or electors, are awarded to the party whose candidate wins the popular vote, the dilutive effect is at its peak. However, this parallel is based on a strained reading of the holding in Whitcomb, which stands for the proposition that multimember districts only prompt equal protection claims when conceived or operated as purposeful devices to further racial . . . discrimination. Whitcomb, 403 U.S. at 160 (emphasis added). And as we have explained, Appellants do not allege such invidiousness behind the WTA system in Massachusetts. Additionally, Appellants hypothesize that since it would be unconstitutional for Massachusetts to provide for the election of its state senators using a single-slate, at-large WTA election (because it would result in single-party rule), it is therefore unconstitutional to adopt the WTA system to appoint Massachusetts's slate of electors. This analogy does not quite pan out, as presidential electors are not a comparable body of representatives, especially now that the Electoral College has effectively lost its deliberative character. -53- Finally, as previously explained, any comparison to White is inapposite. While political elements are certainly a protected class in the voting rights context, White was concerned with an altogether different form of deep-seeded exclusion of racial minorities from equal participation in the political process that extended temporally far beyond the eight election cycles to which Appellants point in their complaint. Therefore, Appellants do not adequately state a claim under a multimember district theory either. Accordingly, we affirm the district court's ruling that Appellants have failed to state a one person, one vote equal protection claim.