A fast draw

Redraw of political districts hurried, less visible

Proposed apportionment maps released last week likely define how most Arkansas legislative districts will be drawn for the next 10 years.

The Arkansas Board of Apportionment — made up of the governor, attorney general and secretary of state — unveiled the plan on Friday, although final action won’t come for a couple of months yet.

First, there will be a month-long period for public review and reaction. The board could make adjustments at a scheduled Nov. 29 meeting, when it is expected to give final approval to the plan.

There’s another 30-day waiting period for legal challenges before the maps become law on Dec. 30.

Whatever is adopted then will be the districts for the state’s 100-member House of Representatives and 35-member Senate for the next decade.

So, what has the Board of Apportionment proposed?

You can see the proposed 2021 legislative redistricting maps for yourself on the board’s website: www.arkansasredistricting.org. Select “Maps” from the menu across the top of the page.

Unfortunately, the online maps first posted as downloads in PDF form weren’t detailed enough to show precisely where the boundaries fall. They at best offer a rough idea of where the new boundaries are.

The interactive maps, which can be viewed as maps or satellite images, can be increased in size to show some identifiable boundaries. On Tuesday morning, the function allowing searches for specific addresses was briefly operable on the Senate map but not the House map. Neither worked later in the morning. Presumably, that will get fixed.

Still, the system is less transparent than it should be, given that Arkansas will live with these redistricting decisions for a decade and people ought to be able to examine the boundaries before they’re adopted.

More precise information on the number of people in each proposed House and Senate district is attached to the PDF version of the online maps, illustrating that the Board of Apportionment managed to stay within a 4.99% plus-or-minus deviation from the ideal size of Senate districts and within a 7.9% deviation in House districts.

The ideal size for a Senate districts, based on the state’s 2020 population of 3,011,524, is 86,044 residents. The ideal size for a House district is 30,115. The goal is to divide both chambers of the Legislature, as nearly as practicable, into districts with equal population.

As drawn, some proposed districts have more residents and others have fewer residents than would be ideal. But the deviation rate should satisfy legal standards.

Importantly, the board did create two new majority-minority districts, one of which is this state’s first House of Representatives district with a majority Hispanic population. It is in Northwest Arkansas. A new Black majority district in Pulaski County was the other addition, increasing the total number of majority-minority districts in the Arkansas House from 11 to 13. The number of majority-minority districts in the Arkansas Senate will remain at four.

As Gov. Hutchinson put it, it was important to protect the influence of districts whose minority populations are currently in the majority.

Unfortunately, another goal of the process was to avoid boundary shifts that would pit incumbent lawmakers against each other.

Betty Dickey, the redistricting coordinator, explained the policy as reflecting the will of the voters who put these lawmakers in office.

For the most part, the board did avoid boundaries that would force sitting lawmakers to run against each other. But a few could have to do it and there may be some political fallout as people in these districts find out what other accommodations have been made to protect others.

Nevertheless, the bulk of the reapportionment work at the state level appears to be all but done. The short time allowed for review of the Board of Apportionment’s work is an unfortunate part of an abbreviated schedule for the Census itself and for the entire reapportionment process. The pandemic slowed the collection of data and its release to the states.

The states have since hurried their reapportionment efforts.

In Arkansas, the Legislature first redrew the state’s congressional district boundaries and now the Board of Apportionment is trying to get these new legislative districts established in time for the 2022 election cycle.

There are organizations, like the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP, whose Arkansas representatives have been following the process and will closely examine the work that was released last week.

They won’t hesitate to sue, if that proves necessary to assure apportionment was fairly done.

But Arkansas really needs to try in the coming decade to put reapportionment in the hands of a nonpartisan commission of some sort, one with a much greater desire for transparency than is being displayed this year.