Voters have made some progress in attempt to draw new political maps
nonpartisan panel to head off another grassroots drive for a constitutional amendment.
In Pennsylvania, the state Supreme Court stepped in last year where federal courts had held back, ruling that a congressional map gerrymandered by Republicans violated the State Constitution.
This year, other ballot initiatives are underway or contemplated in Virginia, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Arkansas, all states where Republicans control mapmaking. Anti-gerrymandering forces are pressing a lawsuit in North Carolina’s state court system, aimed at undoing a gerrymandered state legislative map.
But opponents already are working to undo some of those redistricting initiatives. A group tied to the National Republican Redistricting Trust, an arm of the Republican Party, filed a suit last week arguing that a citizen redistricting commission approved by Michigan voters last year is “blatantly unconstitutional.”
In Missouri, a Republican effort
to cripple a citizen redistricting initiative that was approved last year passed the state House, though it died in the Senate. Utah Republicans are considering changing a nonbinding redistricting initiative that voters approved last year, just as they already have altered two other unrelated ballot measures. Last week, New Hampshire’s Republican governor, Chris Sununu, vetoed legislation broadly backed by both parties that would have established independent redistricting there.
Several hurdles
A total of 18 states allow residents to place constitutional amendments on the ballot for voter approval, and a number of those states have already moved to nonpartisan mapmaking. In some of the remaining states, the route to getting an anti-gerrymandering measure on the ballot is strewn with technical hurdles.
In the large number of states where ballot initiatives are not allowed, changing legislators’ minds, suing them or voting them out of office are the only ways to rein in partisan maps. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision, legislators have even less incentive to surrender their redistricting power — particularly the power to draw congressional maps — unless legislators elsewhere do the same and create new momentum among voters.
No state epitomizes the potential roadblocks more than Wisconsin, where the electorate is all but equally split between the left and right, but the Legislature has remained lopsidedly Republican since the last political maps were drawn in 2011.
The state Constitution does not allow a citizens’ ballot initiative to make redistricting nonpartisan. Anti-gerrymandering advocates say a lawsuit in state courts challenging the Legislature’s maps would be a waste of time; bitterly fought judicial elections, notable for heavy spending by out-of-state interests, have produced a solidly proRepublicanstate Supreme Court.
Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat elected in last year’s landslide, can veto laws implementing Republican-drawn maps in 2021 if he deems the maps too partisan. But news reports this month indicated that conservative activists in the state were discussing a plan to enact redistricting through a joint resolution, which cannot be vetoed, rather than through a law.
The 47 resolutions passed to date largely call for Wisconsin to follow neighboring Iowa, which leaves map drawing to nonpartisan experts but allows legislators to make changes — not behind closed doors, but in public. Iowa’s method, first used in 1980, is widely considered a model for nonpartisan map-drawing.