Sen. Delph (800-382-9467) has introduced Senate Joint Resolution 2 which would amend the Indiana Constitution to provide for redistricting by a redistricting commission. The current constitutional provision provides that the General Assembly elected in the year of a federal decennial census shall fix by law the number of Senators and Representatives and apportion them among districts, as revealed by the federal decennial census.
As amended, the Constitution would allow any General Assembly to change the number of Representatives and Senators (not just the General Assembly elected during a census year). (Another provision caps the numbers at 100 and 50 respectively, so if the numbers were altered, they could only be reduced.)
The amendment would also charge a commission established by the General Assembly with drawing the congressional and legislative districts (current law doesn’t specify congressional versus legislative districts) according to the number of inhabitants in each district “and other criteria established by law.”
I think I’m generally supportive of this notion, but I’m not entirely sure it’s necessary. It seems like, under the current Constitutional language, the General Assembly could require a commission to recommend districts, and then pass those as recommended. Obviously one problem is that it lacks the political will to adopt districts in a politically neutral way (or at least there is a perception that this is the case.) But I don’t know that the problem goes away with this amendment. You still have a legislatively created commission that isn’t necessarily independent creating districts according to instructions given to it by the General Assembly.
You can disregard a lot of the prior paragraph because it seems that Sen. Delph has anticipated this earlier argument (which I’ll just leave as-written instead of restructuring my blog post) because he’s introduced SB 136 which has alternate provisions that both go with the commission’s recommendations with somewhat different procedures depending on whether the Constitution requires the General Assembly to vote for districts directly.
Under SB 136, the commission would be composed of nine members. The Speaker of the House, Senate President pro tem, House minority leader, and Senate minority leader would all appoint two members. Those members are directed to appoint a ninth member to be the chair and, if they can’t agree, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court will make the appointment. The ninth member must be a retired judge. There are provisions designed to exclude politicians and lobbyists (at least on the state or federal level) as members of the commission.
The bill recommends equal populations in each district as ideal but permits deviation of a few percentage points to accommodate compactness of districts and respect for boundary lines of political subdivisions.
I have little to no experience in districting issues, but I’m not finding much to fault with this bill.
I’m missing something because I don’t see the point. Isn’t what’s needed something that says no district can be drawn using information based on the gender, race, age, ethnicity, political preferences, etc. of the residents?
I think the salient point of this is that it lets the Legislature screw with the districting ALL the time and not once every 10 years as it is now. If by some miracle (and I do mean miracle) the Democrats were able to swing the election during the next Presidential cycle (when there may be a significant Trump backlash) and gain control in Indiana, they’d have their hands on the reins for a 10 year long cycle after they redistrict to suit themselves. This will prevent that from happening as in the following 2 year election cycle (assuming that it goes back to R) it would allow the Republicans to simple undo the redistricting.
Any bill that makes it easier for Indiana to follow the example of North Carolina HAS to be a good thing.
Mathematically speaking, this is a solved problem. Anyone who thinks we need humans to do this job has an agenda.
http://bdistricting.com/2010/
If you look at the ‘other redistricting sites’ on that page you will notice other algorithms produce different results. So I do not think that you can say the problem is “solved”. Heck, I suspect (but do not know) that even the algorithm on the page will give slightly different results with different starting conditions.
That said, it seems that there are much better ways to do districting aside from leaving it in the hands of the biased politicians. Indiana is not as bad as some states – North Carolina stands out – but is probably gerrymandered. I recently attended a talk at Purdue which described the problem of proving that a given map was biased. It turns out to be surprisingly hard to do.
Compactness of districts is definitely not something achieved in the current map.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/52/Pagecgd113_in.pdf/page1-994px-Pagecgd113_in.pdf.jpg
Sorry, I wasn’t implying there was a single solution by saying it was “solved.” I was saying that there are algorithms that will optimize for pretty much any criteria you want to look at – population by census tract, voting population, racial homogeneity, income levels.
Bottom line, there is no reason to involve a human in the plotting of the boundaries because computers are able to do this biased only by the constricting variable chosen.
I suspect computers are already involved in redistricting. Both parties know the voter preferences down to the precinct if not the household and undoubtedly use computers to make all of those squiggly lines. However their constricting variable is “make the districts biased in favor of my party without looking like we did so”. Bias is hard to prove especially in Indiana which tends to have concentrations of like-minded voters.
That said, it would be nice to have a more transparent criteria so that multiple people could verify the solution is as correct as it could be.
Looks like someone is working on tools to help expert witnesses to prove bias.
http://www.chronicle.com/article/Meet-the-Math-Professor/239260/
IMHO, the only thing worse than leaving redistricting to a bunch of ELECTED clowns is leaving it to a bunch of UNELECTED clowns,