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Virginia Voters, Legislators Split on Redistricting Amendment

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No one in Virginia likes gerrymandering, but there’s a significant difference of opinion in how to fix it. The amendment Virginians vote on tomorrow offers one plan, but some progressive voices in the Commonwealth feel it’s not the best move.

Before Kelly Herring voted in the presidential election, she was undecided on a key vote, and it wasn’t who she was going to elect for president. 

Herring wasn’t sure how to vote on a Virginia constitutional amendment that will change the process of redrawing congressional and state legislative districts. 

After every 10-year census, the General Assembly is responsible for drawing new congressional and state legislature districts, over which the governor has veto power. The majority of congressional and state legislative districts in Virginia were redrawn after the 2010 U.S. Census, when Republicans controlled both chambers of the General Assembly and the executive branch. The maps will be redrawn again next year with final census counts.

The proposed amendment would put the mapmaking power into the hands of a bipartisan commission. It’s the final step needed to amend the state constitution after state legislators passed the redistricting amendment for two consecutive years.

Kelly Herring, a Norfolk resident, was unsure how she was going to vote on a proposed redistricting amendment in the November presidential election. Photo by Melissa Blue.

Herring is one of millions of Virginians who will weigh in on the amendment — one of two on the current ballot. 

“There was one local issue that I went back and forth on too, but the amendment was a big one,” Herring said. 

The commission would be composed of eight state legislators and eight citizens. An equal number of Democratic and Republican legislators from each chamber of the Virginia General Assembly would be appointed by the political party leadership. Legislative leaders also would recommend people for the citizen positions, which would be selected by retired circuit court judges. 

New legislative district maps approved by the commission would go to the General Assembly for a vote. If any are rejected, the commission would be required to produce new maps. If rejected again, the Virginia Supreme Court would establish the new districts.

The amendment requires maps to be drawn in accordance with federal and state law requirements that address racial and ethnic fairness, including the 14th Amendment and the Voting Rights Act. Maps also need to “provide, where practicable, opportunities for racial and ethnic communities to elect candidates of their choice.”

Some Virginia lawmakers oppose the amendment. They believe it gives legislators more power to choose voters as opposed to voters choosing legislators.

“You have four party leaders that not only control the process, but control the appointment and representation on this commission,” said Del. Lashrecse D. Aird, D-Petersburg. “Ultimately what you get, is legislators actually compounding their party and hanging on to control in the process of map-drawing.”

Delegate Lashrecse Aird. Photo from virginiageneralassembly.gov

Legislators passed a measure in the spring that establishes standards for redistricting. The bill, introduced by Del. Marcia Price, D-Newport News, is intended to prohibit racial gerrymandering, or the manipulation of boundaries that ultimately favors one political party. The measure sets criteria for drawing legislative districts, which includes abiding by equal population requirements, following laws related to racial and ethnic fairness, and creating contiguous districts.

“The Voting Rights Act has been under attack since the day it was signed in 1965,” Price said. “There is nothing that prevents it from being further gutted, so our argument is; don’t just mention it, actually put the protections in there so even if it fails on the federal level, we have the state level that’s protecting us.”

Opponents of the amendment argue that the recently passed redistricting law deals with the effects of racial gerrymandering better than the proposed amendment. Opponents say that passing the amendment could potentially prevent further progress by the General Assembly since it’s difficult to overturn the constitution.

“We have always said that we wanted to prohibit gerrymandering, which is ultimately the main problem that we’ve experienced with map-drawing in Virginia,” Aird said. “There is no language in this amendment that would prevent gerrymandering.”

Nicholas Goedert, an assistant professor of political science at Virginia Tech supports the amendment. Other states have changed the criteria for redistricting but it proved ineffective, he said.

“I think changing the process is much more important as a general rule than changing the criteria,” Goedert said. “Because there are a lot of ways that legislatures can get around the wording of the criteria and still implement a map that suits their interests.”

Goedert said the amendment isn’t perfect, but sees Virginia passing both the amendment and redistricting bill as a step in the right direction to creating more demographically balanced districts.

“We’ve seen, throughout the states that have adopted commissions, that the commissioners take their jobs seriously, and for the most part succeed in drawing acceptable maps,” Goedert said. “There’s always been a couple of exceptions, but I would be optimistic on that point.”

Nicholas Goedert. Photo courtesy of Virginia Tech.

The redistricting amendment is endorsed by several democratic groups, including the ACLU of Virginia and the League of Women Voters of Virginia. Herring, who identifies as progressive, decided to do more research after seeing there were progressive groups on both sides, and ultimately decided to vote no on the amendment.

“The Black Legislative Caucus and the NAACP both spoke out against it, and ultimately gerrymandering is an issue that affects minority voters more,” Herring said. “So, I figured this is probably an issue where I should listen.”

Written by Will Gonzalez, Capital News Service. Top Images of gerrymandered VA maps from VPAP.

How A Question On Your Ballot Will Decide The Fate of Redistricting In Virginia

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On Tuesday, November 3, you’ll have a chance to vote on the way Virginia handles redistricting for the next ten years and beyond. Should you vote yes or no? That depends on who you ask.

A single question on the 2020 electoral ballot will decide the fate of the Virginia redistricting system, and determine how voting districts are drawn for the next ten years. But there is significant disagreement about whether voting for Amendment 1 is really the right way to solve Virginia’s gerrymandering problem.

Electoral districts in Virginia are redrawn every ten years. The last time they were redrawn was in 2011, which means that the 2020 election will play a role in deciding how the 2021 district lines are drawn. Amendment 1 will be on the ballot during this election, and will allow Virginia voters to choose who has the power to draw these lines. 

Voting YES on the ballot question is a vote for Amendment 1, which will give the power to draw district lines to a sixteen-person bipartisan council, made up of eight legislators and eight citizens, evenly drawn from both political parties. Voting NO is a vote against the amendment, and a vote to leave the power to draw district lines with the General Assembly. 

While supporters see this amendment as needed reform for the process of redistricting, opponents say the amendment will lead to more gerrymandering — and will concentrate the power to draw districts into the hands of even fewer people.

Brian Cannon is the executive director of Fair Maps VA, which spun off of One Virginia 2021 but is now a legally separate entity. One Virginia 2021 started in 2013; the Fair Maps VA campaign is a more recent expansion, having started at the end of July. 

Fair Maps VA is in support of Amendment 1, and is encouraging Virginians to vote ‘yes’ on the ballot question. 

Photo via Fair Maps VA/Facebook

Cannon takes a non-partisan approach to district lines because he says that neither party has avoided gerrymandering. He says that though Republicans have done the majority of racial gerrymandering, Democrats have historically not voted against it because they benefited from it. 

“More Democrats voted for the maps than Republicans, though they favored Republicans,” Cannon said, “because the Republicans made the [incumbent] Democrats’ seats safer.”

Cannon says that he himself is a Democrat, but he doesn’t trust the Democratic establishment to draw district lines.

“On the ‘vote yes’ side are all the good government-reform groups; most of them lean left-of-center,” Cannon said. “On the ‘vote no’ side are the Democratic party insiders.”

Cannon said that Richmond is an especially significant place because of how much racial gerrymandering has affected Black voters.

“Partisan and racial gerrymandering are inextricably linked,” Cannon said. “It’s a national phenomenon, but Richmond is a key part of the racial gerrymandering that would dilute Black voices.”

Fair Maps VA’s opposition is Fair Districts VA, a group that was formed recently to oppose Amendment 1. 

Del. Mark Levine (D-Alexandria) is on the board of Fair Districts VA. He says that Amendment 1 is “a mess” and that it will lead to even more gerrymandering.

“The four party leaders pick every single person on the commission,” Levine said. “It’s not independent; it’s a commission of the party leaders. An ordinary citizen can’t join.”

Levine said that the amendment will allow party leaders to draw districts that favor them. Its text includes what Levine calls a “poison pill” — a provision that allows two legislators to disband the commission and take the redistricting issue to Virginia’s conservative Supreme Court. 

“The heart of the amendment is entirely these words — ‘the districts will be established by the Supreme Court’,” Levine said. “At the end of the day, the Supreme Court decides. The Supreme Court can’t police themselves.”

Delegate Mark Levine. Photo via Facebook

Levine says that Amendment 1 would have been preferable to redistricting by a Republican-controlled legislature. But now that Virginia has a Democrat-controlled legislature as well as new legislation to combat unfair redistricting practices, Levine says that Amendment 1 is no longer necessary.

“We already have HB 1255, which banned gerrymandering,” Levine said. “The law protects against gerrymandering, but Amendment 1 facilitates it.”

HB 1225 is a bill that was signed into law in April 2020, which provides criteria for drawing legislative districts — including that they must be contiguous and cannot favor one political party over the other, must not “improperly dilute minority populations’ voting power,” and that prison populations must be counted as part of their home districts, and not the district in which they are incarcerated.

Levine also says that racial gerrymandering has been an issue in Virginia.

“Frankly, it’s about time that Black Virginians have a seat at the table,” Levine said. “Minorities who’ve been gerrymandered out of power should have a seat, but this amendment won’t give them that.”

Fair Maps VA has been trying to raise awareness of the amendment in recent months. They have been texting voters through an app called OutVote, writing Op-Eds in newspapers, and purchasing online ads. They hope to buy a TV ad closer to the election.

“It’s a little weird doing this in a pandemic,” Cannon said.

Fair Districts VA has been trying to raise awareness through Op-Eds and videos, as well as the #NOon1 campaign on social media. Many Virginia politicians have tweeted in support of #NOon1, and have been retweeted by Fair Districts’ twitter account.

They may disagree on whether Amendment 1 is right for Virginia, but both Cannon and Levine agree on one thing– raising awareness of this ballot question, and what it means for Virginia, is crucial. 

“Our biggest opponent is not people saying ‘vote no’ — it’s the people who say ‘I don’t know,” Cannon said. 

Top Image by Drf5n, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia

Virginia Democrats are Bad at this Politics Thing

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While I’m teaching, I find myself restating the same point to my students over and over again: Republicans are better at politics than Democrats. We just saw it recently play out at the national level (welcome, Justice Brohim). And it’s certainly true in Virginia, especially after last week’s redistricting debacle.

Here’s the rundown in case you missed it:

A federal court ordered Virginia to redraw the lines of 11 state legislative districts, arguing that they sorted voters by race in violation of the U.S. Constitution. After the General Assembly called a special session to respond, Democrats offered a new map that seemed designed to help Democrats win more seats — Republicans called it a “partisan power grab.” They then responded with their own map. This plan garnered some bipartisan report, including from the aptly-named Portsmouth Democrat Steve Heretick, who criticized his own party for “corrupt gerrymandering.” The Governor vowed to veto the plan, so the Republicans cancelled the session.

While the Democrats get what they probably want anyway – the courts redraw the lines, probably in ways favorable to Democrats – the GOP gets to paint them as partisan hacks.

We can learn two big lessons from this mess:

First, redistricting remains an important battleground in the national Vote Wars between the two parties. Ever wonder why Republicans scream to the hilltops about voter fraud, despite the lack of any evidence that it’s occurring on a wide scale? Or why Democrats across the country are challenging a number of Republican-drawn district maps in the courts?

It’s the Great Game, played out at a national, state, and local level, in the courts, statehouses, and media, over the basic rules of our electoral system. It includes district lines, but also a number of laws and rules that govern access the polls, like voter ID and polling locations. And the Democrats have been getting their asses kicked in all these arenas for years.

Which brings us to Delegate Heretick, and the second lesson we learned last week; again: Democrats are terrible at politics.

Part of that is individual. Heretick may be a great person, and even a great legislator — but in criticizing his own party, he comes off sounding at best naïve and, at worst, a dupe for the GOP.

It’s great that Heretick supports an independent redistricting process. It’s also great that he wants to “work across the aisle” and find some bipartisan common ground. But he’s operating in a hyper-partisan environment, engaged in a fundamental battle over the rules of the game. Heretick sandbagged his own caucus in the middle of an important political confrontation, and acted like he was the hero of the story. In an interview with the Virginia Mercury’s, Ned Oliver, are Heretick’s own words:

“In other words, the federal court order ordered us to redraw the 11 affected districts … and yet [Democrats] were using this opportunity for a blatantly partisan purpose, and that is to try to weaken Republican incumbents.”

Oh my heavens! How shocking that your political party was practicing…politics (gasp)!  Heretick sounds like a Pollyanna in the middle of a red light district.

But this isn’t entirely the Delegate’s fault; it also doesn’t help that Democrats seemed to bungle the whole process of informing their own caucus. In his interview with Oliver, Heretick complained of a “mysterious” process, including caucus phone calls where he didn’t even know who was on the line. Worse still, the Democrats’ proposed map cut into Heretick’s district, likely reducing his possible margin of victory in the next election. If you want your people to take one for the team, you have to make sure they know why and what they’re getting in return.

The one thing the Democrats did do well was the thing which they were most criticized: offering a blatantly favorable map at the start. You don’t begin negotiations by giving away everything, and a “neutral” map would have meant they were starting the process from the middle — allowing the GOP to chip away at lines until they got something more favorable. Heretick’s complaints about his party’s own gerrymandering just gave political top cover to the GOP who, of course, were engaged in the same kind of gerrymandering on the other side.

It’s obviously not a good thing that this kind of political battle rages in our state legislature. The basic rules of our democracy should not be up for grabs in a power struggle among partisan forces. This is why good government groups like One Virginia 2021 have been so vocal in advocating for redistricting reform: the rules of the game are too important to be determined by the players, especially the ones who are winning.

And everyone who wants bipartisan reform and fair rules have to favor the losing side right now; Democrats have the incentive to change how district lines are drawn because they’ve lost so much ground to the GOP in that battle.

But Heretick was acting last week like the game had already been reset. The Democrats who run his caucus didn’t help him understand this very well. If the Democrats want to avoid even more political losses, they need to get their act together — or, to put it more bluntly, they need to get their heads out of their you-know-whats. I’m not holding my breath.