November Election Sets 

The Stage for 2021 Redistricting

The biggest good news comes in Virginia. Voters approved Amendment 1, which establishes a bipartisan redistricting commission with citizen members. In combination with fairness criteria passed by the General Assembly last year, the Commission will have to treat political parties fairly, protect communities of interest, and ensure racial fairness. 

The story’s not done yet. Governor Northam has appended enabling legislative text to the budget that would limit conflicts of interest on the commission, ensure the diversity of commissioners, increase transparency through public data and public input, and require the state Supreme Court to appoint two special masters in case of deadlock. The General Assembly will vote on the revised budget in its final session, as early as Monday, November 9th. If passed, this enabling legislation would complete a strong process in time for next year’s redistricting.

In Missouri, Amendment 3 took reform a step backward. By repealing the “Clean Missouri” redistricting reform of 2018, Missouri goes back to two politician-appointed commissions, deprioritizes competitiveness and partisan fairness, and guts the use of a technical criterion for fairness, the efficiency gap. The commissions would, however, be equally divided between Democrats and Republicans. Amendment 3 also alters the constitutional language to suggest that the commission can exclude noncitizens and citizen children from the population base for redistricting. This change would likely have a disproportionate impact on minority communities in Missouri, which skew younger. Moreover, if this novel approach is used and survives federal court challenge, it could pave the way for doing the same in Texas, where Latinx communities will be hit particularly hard by such a change.

New Jersey passed an amendment effectively delaying legislative redistricting until the 2023 election cycle, ostensibly to allow time to correct for a bad Census. However, the law doesn’t take any steps to correct data. That hard work will have to be done by the redistricting commission. Unfortunately, the delay will postpone accommodation of the state’s fast-growing Latinx and Asian populations. 

State Supreme Court elections provided a brighter picture. Michigan elected a majority Democratic court. This may matter in challenges to the new redistricting commission. And Ohio went from a 5-2 Republican majority to a 4-3 Republican majority. That court will judge challenges under the fair-districting provisions added to the state constitution. It would be wise for those challenges to avoid citing excess partisanship as the main injury. One of the Fair Districts criteria, a prohibition on incumbency protection, could provide an alternate argument.

Finally, North Carolina judicial elections are headed for a state Supreme Court with 4 Democratic and 2 Republican judges. The seventh seat is the Chief Justice’s. According to the count so far, Democrat Cheri Beasley may end up with an extremely narrow lead, possibly triggering a recount. The court will play a critical role in future gerrymandering cases, since the governor has no say in the redistricting process. Redistricting is once again under single-party-control. The court-ordered redrawing of districts in 2019 left much of the partisan bias in place in both the House and the Senate, allowing majority legislators to keep themselves in power - the original point of the gerrymander. Courts are a powerful route to breaking the Carolina feedback loop.

During this year’s campaign, our Redistricting Moneyball project identified seven states where the election could lead to Democrats and Republicans sharing power in next year’s redistricting. In three states, bipartisan power was achieved. In Minnesota, Republicans retained control of the Senate in the face of a Democratic governor and House. In Connecticut, Democrats fell short of the two-thirds majorities they would need to pass a plan without any Republican votes. And in the Nebraska unicameral, Democrats took 17 seats, enough to sustain a filibuster on legislation, including redistricting.

However, in four states, Democrats failed to overcome single-party Republican control: Texas, North Carolina, Florida, and Kansas. These states were a disappointment to us at PGP, especially Texas, which is expected to have 39 Congressional seats in the upcoming apportionment. The next-best hope for 2021 lies in a robust public comment process, which can be powered by tools such as Representable.org and Districtr. In addition, there is the possibility of future litigation in North Carolina and Florida under fairness provisions in their state constitutions.

We finally turn to other types of voting and democracy reform. In California, voters approved Proposition 17, which restores the voting rights of people on parole for felony convictions upon completion of their prison term -- affecting hundreds of thousands of people. 

Voting systems were on the ballot around the country, but only passed in the city of St. Louis, where voters established approval voting as an election method in primaries. St. Louis is the first major city in America to pass approval voting, making this an exciting experiment in improving democracy. Unfortunately, other primary reforms failed to pass in Massachusetts, Alaska, and Florida.

Finally, an important thing didn’t happen. In Arkansas and Florida, voters rejected ballot initiatives that would have made the ballot initiative process harder or done away with it entirely. Such an act of self-destruction would take away an essential tool for breaking politicians’ hold over democracy. So in Arkansas, Florida and a score of other states, voters still have this important avenue for reform.

These developments interest us because we are about to expand beyond redistricting reform. We hope our new venture, the Electoral Innovation Lab, can repair and improve democracy nationwide. We’ll write about that exciting project another day.

We look forward to seeing you in the year ahead!