Leading Off

● New York City, NY: With a supermajority of members sponsoring the legislation, New York’s heavily Democratic City Council could adopt a bill this month that would grant voting rights in local elections to roughly 800,000 noncitizens who are permanent legal residents. Outgoing Mayor Bill de Blasio recently said he wouldn’t veto the bill despite his concerns about its legality, and incoming Mayor-elect Eric Adams, who takes office Jan. 1, supports the idea. A handful of small localities nationally have granted voting rights in local elections to noncitizen permanent residents, and San Francisco has done so in school board elections, but New York would dwarf those places in impact.

Though it may come as a surprise to many, proposals like this actually have a long history in U.S. politics. For much of the 19th century and up until around the 1920s, many states granted a measure of voting rights to noncitizens who had permanently immigrated to the country. It’s also the norm in many European democracies: In the European Union, EU citizens have the right to vote in elections for local government and the European Parliament in whichever member country they reside, and noncitizen residents have some degree of local voting rights in more than a dozen nations.

State Supreme Court Elections

● NC Supreme Court: North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Robin Hudson announced this week that she would not run for re-election, though even if she’d sought and won another eight-year term, she’d have only been able to serve another year because she’d soon hit the state’s mandatory retirement age of 72. Another Democrat, however, state Court of Appeals Judge Lucy Inman, had already been preparing to run for Hudson’s seat and confirmed her plans following the news of the justice’s departure.​

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​Democrats currently hold a 4-3 edge on the Supreme Court. In addition to Hudson’s seat, they’ll also be defending Justice Sam Ervin IV, who has said he’ll run again in next year’s partisan contest. Control over the court is especially important for resolving the ongoing lawsuits over North Carolina’s Republican gerrymandered congressional and legislative maps (see our North Carolina redistricting item below), and with the upcoming midterm shaping up to be unfavorable to Democrats, there’s a good chance Republicans could gain a majority next year.

Redistricting

● Arkansas: Arkansas’ all-Republican Board of Reapportionment, which handles legislative redistricting, voted unanimously on Monday to adopt new maps for the state Senate and House. The maps will now be final, barring any legal challenges.

● Connecticut: Connecticut’s bipartisan redistricting commission has unanimously approved new state Senate and state House maps, which appear to be bipartisan gerrymanders designed to aid incumbents from both parties. Because the commission took over the redistricting process after lawmakers missed a mid-September deadline to draw maps themselves, the legislature and governor no longer have a role, meaning the legislative plans are now final.

For the congressional map, the commission has asked the state Supreme Court for three more weeks to redraw the state’s five districts after missing Tuesday’s deadline to complete its work. If the commission doesn’t receive an extension (or gets one but fails to finish the job), the task of drafting a new map would fall to the court.

● Georgia: Georgia’s Republican-run state House passed the GOP’s new congressional map shortly before the Thanksgiving break, following the same action in the state Senate the week before and sending it to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. As we previously detailed, the plan is aimed at sending nine Republicans and just five Democrats to Congress, despite the fact that Joe Biden won the state last year; under the current lines, Republicans have an 8-6 advantage.

● Idaho: A third lawsuit has been filed with the state Supreme Court over the legislative map adopted by Idaho’s bipartisan redistricting commission, arguing that the map splits too many counties and was drawn to protect incumbents. Two previous lawsuits were filed last month making similar claims, and the court is scheduled to hear arguments in those cases in January.

● Illinois: Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed Illinois’ new congressional map on Tuesday, which the state’s Democratic-run legislature passed last month. The map, which we previously explored in detail, is an aggressive partisan gerrymander that seeks to shore up several Democratic seats and deliver a 14-3 advantage for the party.

● Louisiana: Last month, a state lower court rejected Republican Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin’s attempt to dismiss a lawsuit filed earlier this year by several Democratic voters seeking to have the courts take over the redistricting process in anticipation of a deadlock between Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards and the GOP-run legislature, letting the case proceed.

● Maryland: A joint committee in Maryland’s Democratic-run legislature has advanced a congressional map on a party-line vote, though the Baltimore Sun reports that legislators “could continue to revise the proposed map, or even replace it altogether” when they convene for a special session on Dec. 6.

The map would target Rep. Andy Harris, the lone Republican in the state’s delegation, by making his 1st District bluer, though it would do so half-heartedly. According to Dave’s Redistricting App, the proposed 1st would have voted for Joe Biden 49-48 compared to the 59-39 margin it gave Donald Trump under the current lines (and Trump would have won the proposed 1st by 51-43 in 2016). But given Maryland’s deep blue lean, it’s readily possible to draw a map where every district went for Biden by at least 20 points.

● Massachusetts: Charlie Baker signed Massachusetts’ new congressional map on Monday, bringing redistricting to a close in the Bay State. The new map, which passed the Democratic-run legislature with several Republican votes in favor, doesn’t make many changes to the previous lines and will likely continue to elect the state’s all-Democratic congressional delegation.

● Nevada: Two Republicans, one a lawmaker and the other a voter, filed a redistricting lawsuit in state court last month shortly after Democrats enacted new congressional and legislative gerrymanders. The Republicans argue that the new maps are illegal partisan gerrymanders in violation of the state constitution and also have impermissibly large population deviations.

● North Carolina: A panel of three state judges, which had a 2-1 Republican majority chosen by GOP Chief Justice Paul Newby, has rejected temporarily blocking the GOP’s new congressional and legislative gerrymanders in two consolidated cases where the plaintiffs argued the maps violated the state constitution. While the case still proceeds on the merits, the plaintiffs have already indicated they will appeal the rejection of a preliminary injunction and may be hoping for a better outcome if the matter reaches the 4-3 Democratic majority on the state Supreme Court.

Meanwhile in a separate case where voting rights advocates are challenging the process itself that Republicans had used to draw the legislative maps for refusing to even consider Voting Rights Act compliance, GOP Superior Court Judge Graham Shirley rejected the plaintiffs’ request to postpone the March primary to May to allow more time to adjudicate the matter in case a redraw is ordered (Shirley was also on the three-judge panel in the other case). That case will also still proceed on the merits, though Republicans are likely hoping to drag out the proceedings late enough that the courts decline to require new districts in time for the 2022 elections even if they ultimately reject the GOP’s maps.

● Ohio: Shortly before Thanksgiving, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine signed the GOP’s new congressional redistricting plan, an aggressive partisan gerrymander designed to give Republicans 87% of the seats in Ohio’s congressional delegation—transforming their current 12-4 edge into a likely 13-2 advantage—despite the fact that Donald Trump carried the state only 53-45. In response, a group of voters backed by Democrats and a coalition of voting rights advocates have filed two separate lawsuits (here and here) with the state Supreme Court arguing that the map violates the state constitution’s ban on partisan gerrymandering and its limit on excessive county splits.

We previously delved into the details of the new map in our other newsletter, the Morning Digest, but it’s worth noting two seats in particular: the open 13th outside of Cleveland and Rep. Steve Chabot’s 1st in Cincinnati. Both seats are designed to favor Republicans despite having flipped to Biden by a whisker after supporting Trump in 2016, since Republicans would likely be favored to hold both in the upcoming midterm environment. Crucially, the GOP may not ever need to worry about a Democratic-friendly year with this map because they passed it without any bipartisan support, meaning that it only has legal force for two elections under the state constitution.

The GOP may in fact have preferred this outcome precisely because it will enable them to tweak the lines in four years rather than waiting out a full decade. That flexibility comes with a potential price, though: Because Republicans couldn’t muster the votes from at least one-third of Democratic lawmakers, a separate constitutional provision will now come into play that bars any redistricting plan that “unduly favors or disfavors a political party or its incumbents.” But how aggressively the Ohio Supreme Court, which has a 4-3 Republican majority, enforces the law is an open question even though retiring GOP Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor has been a swing vote on some matters.

● Oklahoma: Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt signed Oklahoma’s new congressional and legislative maps on Monday, following their recent passage along party lines in the state’s Republican-run legislature. The congressional plan makes the 5th District, which had been the state’s only competitive seat, safely red by cracking the Oklahoma City area among three different districts. The legislative maps, meanwhile, replace maps passed earlier this year, prior to the release of 2020 census data, that relied on population estimates.

● Oregon: Oregon became the first state to conclude litigation over redistricting this cycle after the liberal-leaning state Supreme Court upheld the new legislative maps and Republicans declined to appeal a late-November lower court ruling upholding the congressional lines, both of which were enacted by the Democratic-run legislature. We previously delved into the new congressional districts, noting that the map is a modest gerrymander, most notably by drawing the city of Bend in Central Oregon into the same Democratic-leaning 5th District as the Portland suburbs across the Cascades.

However, the lower court unanimously disagreed with the GOP’s argument that it unduly favored Democrats, rejecting the GOP’s use of the newer "efficiency gap” measure of partisan fairness and instead relying on the “partisan symmetry” metric that has a longer record of acceptance in legal settings. Symmetry compares a party’s statewide vote share to its seat share and deems a map neutral if both parties are able to win a similar-sized majority of seats at a given level of majority support, even if that seat count itself isn’t perfectly proportional above 50% (so in other words, 60% of votes translating into 80% of seats isn’t excessive if both parties could achieve that result when they win 60% of votes).

The new map aims to elect a 5-1 Democratic majority, but because three of those Democratic-leaning seats are somewhat less Democratic than the state itself, Republicans could still win half or slightly more of the districts in a tied election (and indeed the GOP carried half the districts in the 2016 governor’s race despite Democrats winning overall by 51-43). However, because Oregon still leans blue on average, a 5-1 Democratic advantage remains the most likely outcome, though Republicans still have a chance to win additional districts in a strong year for the GOP, particularly the 5th, where Joe Biden won 53-44 compared to 56-40 statewide.

While this round of litigation has concluded, the new maps still may not last the new decade. That’s because good government advocates are making another attempt at putting a constitutional amendment initiative on the 2022 ballot to create an independent redistricting commission after trying to do so last year, when the pandemic complicated their efforts to gather enough voter signatures. Should reformers succeed in getting onto the ballot next fall, they stand a good chance at persuading voters to back the measure, which would result in Oregon redrawing its maps for the 2024 elections if approved.

● South Carolina: South Carolina’s Republican-run state House passed a new map for its own districts on Thursday by a wide margin, with a number of Democrats voting in favor. Maps have also been introduced for the Senate and Congress, but lawmakers have yet to take action on them.

● Wisconsin: The conservative majority on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court handed Republicans a major victory on Tuesday when it issued a ruling saying it would use a “least-change” approach to redrawing the state’s election districts. Under such an approach, the court—which took over redistricting after Democratic Gov. Tony Evers vetoed new Republican plans—will adjust the current maps in order to achieve population equality between districts, purportedly making any necessary adjustments as minimal as possible.

Of course, those old maps are extreme Republican gerrymanders that were passed on party-line votes without any Democratic input a decade ago, ensuring that any resultant new maps will reinforce those gerrymanders if only modest tweaks are made to the existing lines. That means they’d lock in the GOP’s 6-2 advantage in the state’s congressional delegation, despite the fact that Joe Biden carried Wisconsin last year, as well as its wide legislative majorities.

In a dissent written by Justice Rebecca Dallett, the court’s progressives excoriated the majority, saying it was not using a “neutral standard” (as it professed) but rather was “inserting the court directly into politics by ratifying outdated partisan political choices.” Instead, said the dissent (which is well worth a read), the court should rely on traditional redistricting criteria, including requirements in the state constitution for “compactness, contiguity, and respect for political subdivision boundaries.”

As law professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos notes, the majority’s decision to insist on least-change maps—a method not found anywhere in state or federal law—directly conflicts with those requirements, precisely because the existing districts are “the least compact districts in WI’s modern history and split the most counties.” The dissent also points out that the majority did not explain how precisely it defines the concept of “least-change,” which could “refer to the fewest changes to districts’ boundary lines” or “[t]he fewest number of people moved from one district to the next.”

The majority was also unclear as to whether its decision applies only to Wisconsin’s legislative maps, or also to its congressional districts. That ambiguity could allow Democrats to return to federal court, where a three-judge panel stayed a separate lawsuit in order to give the state Supreme Court time to complete the redistricting process. In staying that case, the federal judges said, “Federal rights are at stake, so this court will stand by to draw the maps—should it become necessary.”