REGIONAL- While Republican and DFL legislators continue haggling over competing plans to redraw Congressional and state legislative district lines to reflect the 2020 U.S. Census changes, a parallel effort led by a five-member panel of Minnesota district and appellate judges has plans of its own to consider – four of them, actually.
The boundaries of eight Congressional districts, 67 state Senate districts, and 134 state house districts must be redrawn to accommodate the growth and geographic shifting of the state’s population since the 2010 Census. The new district boundaries will surely deepen the state’s urban-rural divide since 78 percent of the 400,000 new residents added to the state’s population since 2010 reside in the Twin Cities area.
The population targets for redistricting are simple math. Give or take a few by necessity, Congressional districts must have 713,312 people, state Senate districts, 85,172, and state House districts, 42,586.
The process becomes difficult because of politics. New district boundaries can swing the advantage in a given district from one party to the other, potentially affecting the balance of legislative power for the next decade. Not surprisingly, while each party claims its maps to be fair, it’s not hard to quickly find newly-drawn lines that give an apparent edge to one or the other, leading to a stalemate when it comes to compromise.
The courts have been involved with setting new legislative boundaries in Minnesota so long that the youngest generation of voters might assume they’re just part of the prescribed process, but that’s not automatic. If legislators could approve a bipartisan agreement to send to Gov. Tim Walz by Feb. 15, Walz could sign the deal into law.
However, no such agreement was forged during meetings of the DFL-majority House Redistricting Committee, where DFL maps were approved on a party-line vote on Dec. 9. Given extreme partisan divisions exacerbated during the coronavirus pandemic, there’s little reason to expect that DFL and Republican legislators will find middle ground over competing plans in the first two weeks of the new legislative session in February.
That’s when the panel of five judges would intervene to establish redistricting plans that will allow for legally determined election dates to take place as scheduled and ensure that the district boundaries are formulated without politics in mind.
Minnesota Court of Appeals Judge Louise Bjorkman, who is presiding, Court of Appeals Judge Diane Bratvold, Seventh Judicial District Judge Jay Carlson, Tenth Judicial District Judge Juanita Freeman and Third Judicial District Judge Jodi Williamson were appointed to the redistricting panel by Supreme Court Chief Justice Lorie Gildea. In November, the panel adopted nine redistricting principles that include:
• Congressional districts must be as nearly equal in population as is practicable.
• The population of a legislative district must not deviate by more than two percent from the ideal population target.
• Districts shall be drawn to protect the equal opportunity of racial, ethnic, and language minorities to participate in the political process.
• Federally recognized American Indian reservation lands will be preserved and must not be divided more than necessary to meet constitutional requirements.
• Districts must consist of convenient, contiguous territory.
• Political subdivisions must not be divided more than necessary to meet constitutional requirements.
• Communities of people with shared interests will be preserved whenever possible. Such communities of interest include, but are not limited to, groups of Minnesotans with clear similarities of social, geographic, cultural, ethnic, economic, occupational, trade, transportation, or other interests.
• Subordinate to other redistricting principles, districts should be reasonably compact.
• Districts must not be drawn with the purpose of protecting, promoting, or defeating any incumbent, candidate, or political party. The panel will not draw districts based on the residence of incumbent officeholders and will not consider past election results.
Among the nine principles, the last, regarding remaining neutral with regards to politics, is a departure from previous special panels that often made small adjustments to accommodate incumbents who otherwise would have been narrowly placed outside their district.
“If we are called upon to draw new districts, we will do so solely through application of our stated neutral redistricting principles,” wrote Bjorkman in a supplemental memo to the principles.
To avoid conflicting actions filed in various court districts, the five-member panel has authority over all judicial actions filed regarding the 2020 redistricting process. Common to the four filings before the panel are the listed defendants, Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon and Carver County Elections and Licensing Manager Kendra Olson, on behalf of all chief county election officials.
Uncommon are the plaintiffs bringing suit, referred to by a primary surname and representing four distinct constituencies.
One of those groups is led by a former Senate redistricting attorney and a former Ramsey County elections supervisor (referred to as the Wattson plaintiffs); another has GOP leanings (the Anderson plaintiffs); a third comes with DFL ties (the Sachs plaintiffs); and a fourth, spearheaded by Common Cause Minnesota, is advocating for Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) communities to have more clout in the Legislature (the Corrie plaintiffs).
The panel conducted ten public meetings around the state in October to gather public input, and each of the plaintiff groups had to submit plans, maps, and supportive data to the judicial panel last week, including reports on population, how plans split up political subdivisions, and the minority voting age population of each proposed district. It also wants to see how districts meet measurements of compactness.
Oral arguments from the parties will be heard on Jan. 4 at the Minnesota Judicial Center in St. Paul, after which the panel will work to craft the redistricting maps to be enacted should the Legislature fail to meet its Feb. 15 deadline.
MinnPost contributed to this article.