Redistricting

Categories and definitions:

• Redistricting commission – A body responsible for drawing congressional or state legislative districts. There are many different types of commission, some of which serve purely advisory roles to the legislature and some are empowered to create maps themselves. Depending on the state, a commission might be composed of elected officials or political appointees, be fully independent, or something in between.

• Independent redistricting commission (IRC) – A body of citizens separate from the legislature, responsible for drawing the districts used in congressional and state legislative maps. Independent redistricting commission laws typically establish criteria for who can serve on the commission and how maps should be drawn to make the process more transparent and impartial. To qualify as a truly independent commission, it must include a body with partisan balance (including independents), that operates independently of the legislature, isn’t appointed by the legislature, and creates maps that don’t need to be approved by the legislature.

• Nonpartisan redistricting reform – A proposal that creates a nonpartisan process for redistricting, but falls short of including all of the criteria to qualify as a fully independent redistricting commission.

• Revise Process – A bill that substantially changes the process and/or criteria for how districts are apportioned.

• Prison Gerrymandering – This term describes how voters residing in jails or prisons are accounted for in the redistricting process. We tracked reforms around how incarcerated voters are counted, including proposals that allowed incarcerated voters to be counted at their last known address instead of at the jail or prison.

• Local Redistricting Reform – A proposal requiring redistricting reforms for local apportionment of representation i.e. city council or school districts.

➤ See the full list of bills we tracked (PDF)

Even though we’re five years away from the next census, the issue of redistricting reform continues to show up in state legislatures. Whether it’s attempts at planning ahead or fixing problems exposed by the last cycle, this topic was introduced across 10 state legislatures, and changes to the process were passed into law in Minnesota. Here, we’ll break down the policies proposed and interesting trends.

Minnesota ends prison gerrymandering. Minnesota’s HF 4772 was a major piece of voting rights legislation (see the State VRA section for more) that included provisions to end prison gerrymandering. Once implemented, this will allow voters experiencing incarceration to be counted at their last residential address instead of being counted at the prison, which artificially inflates the population of a district containing a prison when many voters residing there are only there for a short time. 

Republican-sponsored reforms. A few proposals did not pass but showed some interesting legislative activity that warrants attention in this section. The first is New York’s A9410, sponsored by 22 Republicans in the minority of the State Assembly, which proposes limits on the legislature’s ability to change the redistricting commission’s maps when it affects more than 2% of the population. Similar to our findings from last year, the majority of proposals in this category were sponsored by Democrats. However, we also found some strong proposals by Republicans in Democratic-controlled states, and this bill is an example of that. There were also examples of attempts from a Republican majority to further increase their advantage: HCR 2058 from Arizona proposed changing the existing IRC’s process by creating a new citizenship census to exclude undocumented people from the redistricting count, and require equal population districts arranged in a “grid-like pattern.” It’s concerning that this policy, as impracticable as written, actually passed one house. 

Local redistricting in Los Angeles. We’d be remiss to exclude a major redistricting story from last year that occurred following the release of our 2023 report. In October of 2022, a national spotlight was put on the local redistricting process in Los Angeles when a closed-door conversation was leaked where LA City Council members, tasked with the responsibility of redrawing Council districts, “used crude and racist comments while plotting to bolster their political power at the expense of Black voters,” according to reporting by the Associated Press. In response, California lawmakers in 2023 passed AB 1248 to 1) take away local redistricting power from the LA City Council and dozens of other large cities, and 2) place that power in the hands of local redistricting commissions made up of residents. This could have had major effects in places like LA, San Francisco, and other large California cities affecting millions of voters, and could have made California the first state to mandate independent redistricting commissions for large cities. Instead, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) vetoed it, saying he supported the “goal of ensuring community control over the redistricting process” but was worried the reform could cost the state tens of millions of dollars. 

Even though it hasn’t been a busy year for redistricting reform in legislative sessions, seven states still saw proposals for independent redistricting commissions this session. Two jurisdictions even saw major redistricting reform questions on the November ballot – in Ohio and Los Angeles, CA. The Ohio measure lost, thanks in part to seriously misleading ballot language. However, despite Gov. Newsom’s veto of AB 1248 in 2023, in 2024 Los Angelinos approved independent redistricting for the city’s nearly 5 million voters by an almost 50-point margin.