University at Buffalo Law SchoolCongressional Redistricting Team Presentation

The Team

Students:

• Mathew Burrows

• Lauren Skompinski

• Eric Tabache

• Nutan Sewdath

• Jacob Drum

• Andrew Dean

Faculty Advisor:

• Michael Halberstam, J.D., Ph.D.

Major Developments in Redistricting ConferenceOctober 14-15th 2011

Panels:• Constitutional Frameworks and Communities of Interest• Anatomy of a Redistricting: Erie County• Goals of Reform: Transparency and Public Participation • The California Citizens Redistricting Commission • Public Knowledge and Attitudes and Redistricting Institutions• Trends in State and Local Redistricting: This Side of the Mississippi• Process and Politics in Ohio• Re-re-redistricting Texas• Redistricting Texas Municipalities with Different Forms of Governance• Democratic Control of Federal Voting Rights Enforcement by the U.S. Attorney General• Ongoing Constitutional Challenges to Section 5: The Potential Impact on Redistricting• Federalism as a Constraint on the Voting Rights Act• Reconceiving Measures of Racial Vote Dilution• Racial Vote Dilution in the Courts Today• Designing and Selling Commissions to New York Counties and Municipalities• How We Got Here: Jurisprudence of Reapportionment in New York State• Legality, Legitimacy, Transparency In N.Y.S. Local Redistricting• How to Use the Public Mapping Project’s Open Source “DistrictBuilder” to Draw New York Election

Districts

2012 New York Redistricting Project

• Presented by the Center for Electoral Politics at Fordham University and the Public Mapping Project, with funding by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

• Hosting a student competition, challenging teams of students representing New York colleges and universities to design New York State’s congressional and state legislative districts.

• Competition challenged student teams to produce Congressional and state legislative redistricting plans that embraced a number of criteria.

First Steps

• October 17th – 21st

– A group of first-year law students, many having attended the Major Developments in Redistricting Conference, organized to take up the redistricting challenge

• October 24th-31st

– Began meeting twice weekly• discussed the criteria of the competition.

• Debated which maps to draw, settling on Congressional.

• Considered whether school districts could be utilized as “kernels” or “least common denominators” for redistricting purposes, and not to be divided.

• Created accounts on the public mapping software.

• Met with Professor Halberstam to discuss the legal requirements for Congressional districts.

Weighing the Criteria

• Preserving Communities

• Compliance with the Voting Rights Act

• Political Competitiveness

• Contiguity

• Compactness

• Equipopulation

• Existing Political Subdivisions

Preserving Communities

• Examples of Shared Identities by Region– Adirondacks

– Central New York

– Hudson River Valley

– Western New York

– Leatherstocking Country

– New York City

• Untangling districts to favor communities

– Long Island

Compliance with the Voting Rights Act

• One person one vote (equipopulation)– Target of 717,707 persons per district.

– Each of our 27 districts is within less than 1% of target.

• Maintaining and expanding minority representation– Preserving three African-American voting-age majority districts.

– Preserving one Asian-American voting-age plurality district.

– Adding an additional Hispanic voting-age majority district (total of two).

Retaining and Encouraging Political Competitiveness

• Minimizing partisan differentials by district– Upstate, new district partisan differentials are a competitive 8%.

– This number increases as districts enter urban areas.

– Statewide, 15 of our congressional districts have partisan differentials of less than 10%.

• Proportionality– Democratic statewide vote is 61.8%.

– New districts, based on results from the 2010 elections for Governor, would improve statewide proportionality.

Drawing Sensible Districts

• Contiguity– All districts are fully contiguous and “land contiguous”, meaning that

one could go from any point of the district to any other without crossing through an intervening district.

• Compactness – The Schwartzberg measure (dividing the area of the shape of a

district by the area of a circle with a perimeter of equal length).

– Improved average compactness from current 48.5% to 61.20%.

• Existing Political Subdivisions

Using the Public Mapping Software

The Maps - Upstate

Before After

New York City

Before After

Long Island

Before After

Hispanic Majority VAP

Conclusion

• Drawing Congressional Districts leaves us with enormous respect for the challenges inherent in the process.

• It is impossible to draw “perfect” districts, and very hard to draw “fair” districts.

• Legislators do not have the luxury of drawing from scratch, they inherit the existing districts and modify them.

• Inserting objective criteria into the mapping process produces dramatic results.

Special Thanks

• Professor Michael Halberstam, J.D., Ph.D.

• Center for Electoral Politics at Fordham University

• The Public Mapping Project

• The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

• Justin Levitt and Erica Wood, the Brennan Center for Justice

• The University at Buffalo Law School