New CLC Report: Best Practices for Redistricting Commissions to Achieve Fair Representation
Washington, D.C. — Today, Campaign Legal Center (CLC) released a report to help lawmakers, experts, activists and citizens look to the lessons of the 2021 redistricting cycle and understand how a well-designed redistricting commission can deliver fair representation and what the process to get there should look like.
This report focuses on three overarching aspects of redistricting commissions: how they’re designed, how the commissioners are equipped and how the rules governing commissions can ensure they deliver on their promises.
Through case studies that analyze redistricting commissions in different states and with different structures, the report outlines several features that make redistricting commissions successful and draws attention to issues that tend to prevent commissions from reaching their potential. A two-page summary of the report can be found here.
Redistricting commissions should be:
- Truly independent and insulated from legislative and other political influence.
- Vested with the full authority of redistricting.
- Made up entirely of citizen commissioners who are broadly representative of the diversity of their state.
- Evenly split between the primary political party, secondary political party, and Independents.
- Large enough to disperse responsibilities, encourage collaboration and compromise, and prevent one or two outlier commissioners from derailing the process.
- Made up of commissioners empowered to understand and make decisions regarding the complexities of redistricting.
- Assisted by trustworthy and knowledgeable staff and advisors, selected through a process designed to give commissions a broad base of options.
- Guided by clearly defined and ranked criteria protective of the rights of every voter.
- Making decisions and drawing maps with processes aimed toward building consensus as opposed to rewarding contention.
- Redistricting through a participatory, inclusive, and transparent process.
- Required to demonstrate how the final maps incorporate public input.
- Ensuring the enactment of fair maps through a clear, specific fallback mechanism.
Background:
When the people in charge of drawing voting maps are the same people who stand to benefit from influencing those maps, voters lose. When structured correctly, independent redistricting commissions (IRCs) can prevent gerrymandering and deliver fair maps for voters by taking decisions about where to draw district lines out of the hands of politicians and handing that power back to citizens. CLC has long been a proponent of IRCs, having advocated for the creation of independent redistricting commissions across the country and defended them in court.
For more information, or to speak with the report’s authors, please contact [email protected].