Panel told census data nearly here

Raw 2020 census data is expected to come in sometime this week and be available for public review in early September, lawmakers learned Monday morning from their staff.

Matthew Miller, assistant director of the Legal Division of the Bureau of Legislative Research, and Michelle Davenport, legislative attorney in the Legal Division, presented to the House Committee on State Agencies and Governmental Affairs an overview on congressional redistricting plans for this year.

State law establishes that Arkansas is divided into

four congressional districts and the responsibility for the delineation of congressional districts of mostly equal population is given to the Arkansas General Assembly. The U.S. census data is used to determine how these districts will be formed.

Census officials indicated earlier this year that the data wouldn’t be delivered to all states until Sept. 30.

An Ohio attorney filed a lawsuit requesting earlier delivery of the information and, as part of a settlement, census officials agreed to make the data available using an older format to expedite the process.

Miller told the committee that the raw data will be available to their software vendor on Thursday.

“We have to hope that the download comes through perfectly,” Miller said. “But when we tell you it’s ready, then it will be ready.”

Davenport said the raw data is similar to a huge excel spreadsheet that the software vendor will need to break down to make it usable. She said it will take several weeks for their software vendor to put this data in a usable and searchable format.

“Most systems can’t run the data in its raw format,” she said.

Thursday’s data release will contain all the census information including congressional, county and even city data.

“This data will go down to individual blocks,” Miller said.

Davenport said the official release date of the 2020 census data is Sept. 30. She said Thursday’s data is identical to the Sept. 30 data, but it’s not been put into a searchable format.

Arkansas has four U.S. House of Representative seats and is expected to keep that number after the census data is received, but how the districts are drawn will change.

Each of Arkansas’ congressional districts needs to be as close to 753,439 people as possible to ensure equal representation.

All the districts will need some boundary adjustments to meet that population goal, with the 3rd Congressional District in Northwest Arkansas expecting to see the most change when it comes to loss of territory because of population growth in that area.

Davenport said once the census data is received and formatted, then legislators will be able to meet regarding redrawing the boundaries of the four congressional districts.

Once lawmakers agree on new boundaries, the information will be transmitted to Davenport for a bill to be drafted reflecting the new boundaries.

“The state must show that any population deviation is justified by some particular governmental reason,” Davenport said. “Population variance between the four congressional districts is one of the potential areas for legal challenge in redistricting.”

Davenport said keeping the variance below 1% is the general standard, but that isn’t the hard rule and that the Census Bureau notes that the goal is for a district to be as equal in population to all other districts as practicable.

The Bureau of Legislative Research also presented to the committee their criteria for traditional redistricting.

Davenport said the criteria include the preservation of counties and other political subdivisions, having the minimum distance between all parts of the constituency and avoiding districts that would create contests between incumbents.

The House State Agencies committee chairman, Rep. Dwight Tosh, R-Jonesboro, said he would like to see counties not be split when they do the congressional redistricting.

“I want to get each congressional district as close as possible and if we can draw these congressional districts without splitting counties if possible,” he said. “Personally, I would rather see if we can avoid splitting any counties if possible.”

Tosh said this was just something he wanted committee members to think about for now.

Davenport said the congressional redistricting is the first domino to fall, meaning they won’t have to wait for counties to make their own changes to their boundaries and voting precincts.

“The information will state ‘as they existed as of Jan. 1, 2021,’ this means the information for congressional districts will be preserved but it will allow counties to make any changes they need to,” she said.