[EL] Evenwell vs prison gerrymandering

[Douglas Johnson]

I think the Project’s response highlights the predicament they find themselves in between these two cases. The Project’s response seems to boil down to requiring every state, school district, city, county, and other jurisdiction that conducts elections by-district to individually evaluate the presence or lack of “strong ties to the community” for each and every resident who is not eligible to vote, then to adjust the population data for their jurisdiction’s redistricting based on those findings. 


 


In my opinion, this is a prohibitively expensive undertaking, prone to arbitrary decision-making depending on the political interests of those in charge of the count. And it goes directly against the significant body of Court precedents seeking clear rules that would both limit judicial involvement in redistricting and that aim to make Court rulings in redistricting cases rule-driven.


 


So I understand the political usefulness of this argument, but I do not think this wins in court.


 


Also, I would encourage the Project and Demos to avoid blaming the Census Bureau, as they do in this article. It’s not the Census Bureau’s fault that state prison records on residency for incarcerated felons are so full of errors. When it has the funding to do so, the Bureau has always been fantastic about taking high-quality data from state and local jurisdictions and incorporating it into each decennial census. But the Bureau has been understandably reluctant to utilize data that is as poorly organized, and that has such weak quality controls, as most states’ prisoner residency records. By blaming the messenger, the Project and Demos risk alienating the only entity that has the influence, expertise and national reach needed to fix the problem they want fixed. That’s a high price to pay for scoring a political point or two.


 


-        Douglas Johnson, Fellow


Rose Institute of State and Local Government, Claremont McKenna College


Douglas.johnson at cmc.edu <mailto:Douglas.johnson at cmc.edu> 


310-200-2058


 


 <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=76741> “The NY Times column on Evenwel and prison gerrymandering hinges on superficial contradictions”


Posted on  <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=76741> October 16, 2015 7:10 am by  <http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3> Rick Hasen

The  <http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/news/2015/10/15/evenwel-nyt/> Prison Gerrymandering Project responds to  <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/13/us/politics/aclus-own-arguments-may-work-against-it-in-voting-rights-case.html> Adam Liptak:

The Evenwel plaintiffs seek to entirely exclude all non-citizens from redistricting counts, regardless of their residence in, and strong ties to, the community in which they are counted. By contrast, the plaintiffs in the Cranston case have made a careful, fact-based determination of where people incarcerated at the facility actually reside, be it in Ward 6, elsewhere in Cranston or outside of the city and want the city’s districts to treat those groups separately.

Simply put, Cranston does not have the authority to fix prison gerrymandering problems outside its jurisdictional boundaries, and so plaintiffs have not sought to force them to do so.

 

 
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