“What Redistricting Looks Like in Every State”
FiveThirtyEight has launched a new site dedicated to examining congressional redistricting.
Category Archives: redistricting
“Census experts puzzled by high rate of unanswered questions”
Associated Press:
Census Bureau statisticians and outside experts are trying to unravel a mystery: Why were so many questions about households in the 2020 census left unanswered?Residents did not respond to a multitude of questions about sex, race, Hispanic… Continue reading
House elections are unnecessarily uncompetitive
This Washington Post column builds on a numerical comparison of 2020 House and Senate elections that the Election Law at Ohio State team has developed. In addition to the example of Georgia discussed in the column, it’s worth considering the… Continue reading
A plug for “All About Redistricting” as the census data will soon be released
Justin Levitt’s tireless work at “All About Redistricting” is being carried on by Doug Spencer while Justin is in the government. It is an extraordinary and valuable resource. From the “About this site”:
All About Redistricting is a… Continue reading
“The voting fix that cannot wait: Stopping partisan gerrymandering”
Michael Li op-ed in the Washington Post. As he notes, “On Aug. 16, the Census Bureau releases map data to states. After that, states are expected to rush to complete maps. Eighteen states, including Texas, Ohio and North Carolina,… Continue reading
“Redistricting battles kick off early as Democrats scramble to try to cut into GOP advantages”
Washington Post:
The battle over the once-a-decade realignment of legislative and congressional districts is underway across the country even before new maps have been drawn, with lawsuits filed in nearly a dozen states, signaling how intense the fight for… Continue reading
“Census Data Change to Protect Privacy Rattles Researchers, Minority Groups”
Wall Street Journal:
A plan to protect the confidentiality of Americans’ responses to the 2020 census by injecting small, calculated distortions into the results is raising concerns that it will erode their usability for research and distribution of state… Continue reading
No vacation w/o voting reform
So argue Dave Daley and Mike Parsons: “Whatever else Democrats decide to do with election reform before the recess, they should put partisan gerrymandering to a vote ASAP.”
I agree wholeheartedly that Congress needs to act now to ban… Continue reading
Dems Attempt to Jumpstart S1
NY Times: Meeting at the White House, maybe. “Democrats are close to finalizing a scaled-back bill that activists hope could be a battering ram in the fight over the filibuster.” I still wonder whether the better filibuster strategy is… Continue reading
S1 v2: Senate revisits electoral reform
Washington Post reports on today’s meeting among Senate Democrats to bring forward new version of S1, the For the People Act, building upon Senator Manchin’s compromise proposal. There’s also the possibility of new provisions aimed at election subversion. But there’s… Continue reading
The GOP & the VRA: Frenemies?
A reader of the blog sent along a link to this article: How to Win a “Long Game”: The Voting Rights Act, the Republican Party, and the Politics of Counter‐Enforcement. Here’s the abstract:
ADRIENNE JONES and ANDREW POLSKY examine… Continue reading
NFRPP Discussion of S1/HR1
The Network for Responsible Public Policy last week hosted a discussion on the current status, and future prospects, of the For the People Act, still pending in the Senate as S1 (having been enacted by the House as HR1). Dan… Continue reading
Competitive Districts Part II: Colorado’s Independent Redistricting Commission
Now that I’ve described in Part I how DRA enables assessing a map’s competitiveness, along with other dimensions, I’ll lay out how DRA makes it possible to compare different maps. To do that, I’ll compare the preliminary map for the… Continue reading
Designing Competitive Redistricting Maps: Part I
Colorado’s congressional districts are being drawn by an independent redistricting commission created in 2018 by “Amendment Y,” a legislatively referred constitutional amendment that voters approved. That amendment also specifies the criteria the commission is to use. After specifying that districts… Continue reading