Redistricting influences our voting capabilities. Small changes in district lines can solidify a majority of voters for a particular party or split its opponents among multiple districts to dilute their influence. Republicans need to net just five seats to regain the U.S. House in the 2022 elections, which could determine the fate of President Biden’s remaining agenda
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Redistricting has been handled by state lawmakers and governors who have an incentive to draw lines favoring their own parties. But public attention to gerrymandering, which is a practice intended to establish an unfair political advantage for a particular party or group by manipulating the boundaries of electoral districts has grown in recent decades.
As a result, voters in an increasing number of states have shifted the task to special commissions.
When voters in some states created new commissions to handle redistricting, the hope was that the bipartisan panelists could work together to draw new voting districts free of partisan gerrymandering. Instead, cooperation has proved elusive.
In New York, Ohio and Virginia, commissions meeting for the first time this year have splintered into partisan camps to craft competing redistricting maps based on 2020 census data. The divisions have disappointed some activists.
As a result, the new state House and Senate districts in Republican-led Ohio will still favor the GOP. Democrats who control New York could still draw maps as they wish. And a potential stalemate in Virginia could eventually kick the process to the courts.
Some commissions — such as those in Arizona, California, Colorado and Michigan — consist solely of citizens who hold the final say on what maps to enact. But others, such as in Ohio and Virginia, include politicians among their members or require their maps to be submitted to the legislature for final approval, as is the case in New York, Virginia and Utah.
If New York’s Democratic-led Legislature rejects the work of the new commission, then lawmakers can draft and pass their own redistricting plans. Democrats and Republicans on the commission failed to agree and instead released competing versions of new maps for the U.S. House, state Senate and state Assembly.
The commission’s division frustrated Jennifer Wilson, deputy director of the League of Women Voters of New York. The organization supported the 2014 ballot measure that created the commission and encouraged people to testify at the panel’s public hearings this year.
In Ohio, where a commission dominated by Republican elected officials voted this past week to adopt a state legislative redistricting plan they favored. Because the plan had no Democratic support, the state constitution limits it to four years.
Democrats on the panel called the maps unfair. But Republican Senate President Matt Huffman asserted that special interests pressured Democrats not to back a redistricting plan that could have lasted the entire next decade.
The partisan map came despite more than a dozen public hearings dominated by testimony from Ohio residents who said the current gerrymandered maps have left them out in the cold.
In the neighborhood around the Islamic Center of Cleveland, one of the region’s largest Muslim populations, is fractured into multiple congressional and statehouse districts. Because of the way that districts are drawn elected officials have no incentive to be receptive, responsive or accessible to constituents concerns.
The Michigan panel of four Democrats, four Republicans and five independents has so far avoided devolving into partisan encampments.
Meanwhile, in Virginia, two separate mapmakers hired for Democrats and Republicans are to submit rival plans for consideration this coming week by the 16-member commission, which has four lawmakers and four citizens from each major party. If the commission can’t agree — or the Democratic-led General Assembly rejects its maps — the decision will fall to the state Supreme Court, which is dominated by GOP-appointed judges.
Mid term elections are set for next year, and the policies that the NABWMT agrees with, could be at risk. The NA Media Team has a Political Action campaign to inform our members and allies of such concerns and help people vote on such events that deny our right to vote.
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Source: DAVID A. LIEB ASSOCIATED PRESS as reported in the Los Angeles Times