Daniel Nichanian for The Appeal. … Continue reading
Category Archives: redistricting
Cleveland.com reports. … Continue reading
AP: Republican senators rolled out a plan Tuesday to ask Missouri voters to undo key parts of a nationally unique redistricting model that directs a demographer to draw new legislative districts with “partisan fairness” and “competitiveness” as top criteria.The Republican … Continue reading
AP report, with a rundown of the major states in play. … Continue reading
The Philadelphia Inquirer reports on documents from the trove released by Thomas Hofeller’s daughter: “GOP gerrymandering got greedy the last time and bad political climate caused it to unravel,” one of the state-by-state analysis documents in the files said of … Continue reading
The initiative to institute a commission in Nevada was amended and refiled to address a trial judge’s concerns about the ballot description. … Continue reading
At the same time as the Thursday hearing on voting system security that I’d mentioned, House Oversight will be holding a hearing on “Reaching Hard-to-Count Communities in the 2020 Census.” The witness list is still TBD, as far as I … Continue reading
The AP reports on Florida’s … exceedingly recent efforts to raise census awareness. In this context, I’m not sure whether “it’s never too late” is quite accurate. … Continue reading
A bill has passed the state Senate, and is working its way through the state Assembly. If it gets signed into law, that would make New Jersey the seventh state to change where incarcerated individuals are counted for representational purposes. … Continue reading
Joe Spaulding, lead field strategist for the Voters Not Politicians Michigan independent redistricting campaign that got 440,000 signatures in 4 months without paying any signature gatherers, reveals some follicular (and data-supported) tactics for fighting diminishing returns out in canvass-land. Thread. … Continue reading
As Hansi notes, Stephanie Hofeller just dropped the first full tranch of documents on The Hofeller Files. Enjoy. … Continue reading
The Arizona Daily Star goes quite deep on the past, present, and future of Arizona’s Independent Redistricting Commission. … Continue reading
Reid Wilson, in The Hill, discusses the population shift to cities. For those following census issues closely, one of the impacts of the implementation of differential privacy may blunt that apparent move a bit on the margins. As a really … Continue reading
Bill Leonard weighs in on new opportunities for partisan gerrymandering after the Census. … Continue reading
Larry Wilson contrasts California’s approach to Census outreach with the approach in Texas. … Continue reading
This seems like a good roundup of many of the electoral proposals on the agenda in Virginia for the coming legislative session. … Continue reading
Alabama is right on the brink of losing a congressional seat – under most projections, it’s the state that would get the 436th seat if that were a thing. (And that’s if the Census count is actually accurate.) And so … Continue reading
In Arizona, the commission on appellate court appointments is also the screening body for applicants to the state’s independent redistricting commission. And with tomorrow’s deadline on applications to the commission, KJZZ has a story on some of the upstream impact … Continue reading
Sam Wang urges the new unilateral Democratic majority in Virginia to follow through on redistricting reform. … Continue reading
The Post’s editorial board laments the potential change of heart after the change in electoral fortunes. … Continue reading
The Daily Wire ties the census, redistricting, and (perhaps) a bit of wish fulfillment. They’re not wrong about legislative leadership use of redistricting to enforce party discipline, though. It’ll be interesting to see the extent to which New York’s new … Continue reading
Election Data Services and Polidata have their new apportionment calculations up, based on the latest year-end Census estimates – they estimate the congressional seats apportioned to each state if the Census count follows past trends … and if the count … Continue reading
Hansi Lo Wang with an NPR report on prison gerrymandering. I’ve tried to convince the Census Bureau to change the way it counts people who are incarcerated, but no national change is coming this decade. States and localities are waking … Continue reading
Michigan’s new independent commission law requires the Secretary of State to send hundreds of thousands of applications to randomly selected citizens … and the applications are now in the mail. … Continue reading
A compelling report on the abundant challenges facing Native Americans seeking an accurate count, and the extraordinary stakes for some of the smaller and more isolated communities. … Continue reading
And for David Daley, one of the biggest stories of the decade-in-review is partisan gerrymandering. … Continue reading
A few stories about incumbent government officials weighing the merits of redistricting reform, finding reason to put up the strongest resistance coincidentally right when they unilaterally control the partisan levers of power. In Virginia, it’s Democrats; in Idaho, Republicans. … Continue reading
And Jane Timm at NBC News previews the 2020 redistricting cycle these partisan fights are about. … Continue reading
Jerry Goldfeder and Myrna Perez in the NYLJ. … Continue reading
Quite a read from Melissa Boughton for NC Policy Watch. … Continue reading
CAP report. … Continue reading
Brennan Center: The Brennan Center has studied best practices and developed a guide and model language for creating commissions that put community interests above partisan considerations, promote transparency, and bolster public accountability. We incorporated feedback from our partners that represent constituencies of … Continue reading
I explore the implications in this thread, ending with the question whether the North Carolina Supreme Court will get involved to reverse despite the timing issue: Breaking A North Carolina state court has refused to grant relief to those challenging … Continue reading
Detroit News: Groups hoping to upend Michigan’s new redistricting commission faced a setback as a judge said they weren’t likely to succeed in arguing the commission violated their constitutional rights.U.S. District Court Judge Janet Neff denied the Republican groups’ push … Continue reading
Hearing is set for December 2 (which would have been the filing deadline), per the court’s order (h/t Melissa Boughton). … Continue reading
The issue is teed up for the court: Dueling motions in 3-judge state court Harper v Lewis #ncpol US House redistricting case: defendants ask summary judgement, and for case be dismissed as moot after new plan enacted: https://t.co/uep4IIjE5u / plaintiffs … Continue reading
Andrew Chin, Gregory Herschlag, and Jonathan Mattingly have posted this draft on SSRN (forthcoming, South Carolina Law Review). Here is the abstract: In recent years, the U.S. mathematical community has been directing unprecedented attention to the problem of partisan gerrymandering, … Continue reading
News and Observer: The Republican-led North Carolina Senate approved a new congressional district map Friday to be used in 2020 that is likely to shrink the GOP’s edge in the state’s congressional delegation.But Democrats plan to challenge the map in … Continue reading
News & Observer: The new map that started advancing on Thursday would likely have an 8-5 Republican advantage. U.S. Rep. GK Butterfield, a Wilson Democrat, said Democrats have little chance of winning a sixth seat.“To have a fair map we … Continue reading
Walker: Tag team to counter @EricHolder is in the courts/data with @TheNRRT and in state elections with @RSLC Republicans need to wake up or Democrats will gerrymander themselves into power all across America – like they did in VA. And … Continue reading
NPR: A prominent GOP redistricting strategist had direct communication with an adviser to the Trump administration concerning the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census, newly released emails show….The administration’s now-former adviser on census issues, Mark Neuman, however, … Continue reading
WaPo: In North Carolina, lawmakers have been forced back to the drawing board yet again after a state court ruled last month that the current congressional map was drawn illegally along partisan lines.It’s the latest judicial rebuke of gerrymandering in … Continue reading
Release. … Continue reading
Jackson Free Press: Even as Republicans swept statewide offices in Mississippi on Tuesday night, Joseph Thomas, an African American Democrat in a district that stretches across six counties, narrowly flipped a GOP-held Senate seat. Earlier this year, a federal court … Continue reading
Daniel Jacobson: MORE DETAILS: every time Hise leaves, he asks for 7 copies of the latest version of the map to be printed. And one of the times this morning, he said “they” want to see what a particular map … Continue reading
Michael Li: So far Ds have won the Virginia state senate & (for now) appear to have a good chance of winning the state house as well – thanks to a redrawing of the map. That’ll give them a trifecta … Continue reading
WRAL: The nuts and bolts of yet another North Carolina redistricting will start getting laid out Tuesday when legislative leaders huddle on the state’s court-challenged congressional maps.House and Senate leadership announced the committee late Monday, appointing the usual suspects to … Continue reading
David Daley: “I PROPOSE THAT we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats,” said North Carolina Rep. David Lewis, in 2016 in a legislative committee hearing, “because I do not believe it’s possible to … Continue reading
Today a three-judge considering partisan gerrymanders under the North Carolina state constitution issued two orders. In one order, the court approved the North Carolina General Assembly’s maps for state legislative district lines passed after the court had earlier found a … Continue reading
Slate: “For the first time ever,” Justice Elena Kagan declared on June 27, “this court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities.”Kagan was reading a summary of her dissent in Rucho v. Common Cause, … Continue reading