Comments on the PA Senate map
Monday January 17, 2022 To: Chancellor Mark Nordenberg Chairman of the Pennsylvania Legislative Redistricting Council Mr. Nordenberg, I commend you for your even tempered and courteous conduct of the LRC. However, I strongly believe that the Senate preliminary map violates the “partisan fairness and proportionality” principle of your Pennsylvania Redistricting Advisory Council, and the map must be adjusted to be in accordance with that. 1. The Redistricting Principles of the Pennsylvania Redistricting Advisory Council state “…any proposed map must comply with the requirements of federal law, including most specifically, the constitutional requirement to maintain population equality among congressional districts and the provisions of the Voting Rights Act as they apply in Pennsylvania.” 2. These Redistricting Principles also state, “Ensuring partisan fairness and proportionality requires that parties have the opportunity to translate their popular support into legislative representation with approximately equal efficiency such that the proportion of districts whose voters favor each political party should correlate to the statewide preferences of the voters. Partisan fairness requires preventing structural advantage from being baked into the map so as to allow one party to more efficiently translate votes into seats in the delegation [bold underline mine]. In evaluating a proposed map, the Governor should analyze how it would have performed in a full range of prior statewide elections when compared to other potential maps which could have been drawn. A map with expected performance proportional to statewide voter preference should be favored as comporting with broad principles of fairness.” 3. The map experts testifying Friday January 14 in the afternoon all agreed that there is a Republican bias in the preliminary LRC State Senate map proposed in December 2021. Based on the above principles, this should not be the case. Why would this condition be proposed in a state where the state Democrat candidates have recently received an approximately equal number of votes as the Republican candidates, and where registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by almost 6%? The partisan fairness and proportionality principle indicates that seats in the House and Senate should be approximately equal, or slightly favor the Democrats. To be otherwise would violate this principle, subject the LRC plan to lawsuits, and be a miscarriage of justice. 4. Looking solely at Presidential voting, here is a summary of recent past Democrat leaning Presidential voting: “Pennsylvania …. voted Democratic in the six Presidential elections prior to 2016 [with margins from 2.5% to 10.3%]. That election saw Donald Trump win the state by 0.7%, ….. Again competitive in 2020, Joe Biden won by 1.2% ... [in other words] since 2000, Pennsylvania has voted Democratic 83.3% of the time and Republican 16.7% of the time.” 5. Pennsylvania is now a Democratic leaning state, based on these data above. Your final map must lean Democratic, not Republican, in order to comply with your Redistricting Advisory Board’s partisan fairness and proportionality principle and to NOT be in violation of the Voting Rights Act. 6. To quantify the Pennsylvania House and Senate situation, the table below shows the most recent election results (2016, 18 and 20) making crystal clear the extreme lack of proportional representation in both the PA House and Senate. The Republicans have had a 7% advantage, when comparing the difference between the percent of the popular vote vs. the percent of the seats won. This extremely unfair Republican advantage is a violation of the partisan fairness and proportionality principle which the LRC is obligated to enforce. It is the obligation of the LRC to correct this unfairness by its final map! PA state election analysis 2016, 18 and 20 Year Branch Party Popular vote % Seats won % Advantage or -Disadvantage 2020 Senate Republican 50.87% 60.00% 9.13% Democrat 49.13% 40.00% -9.13% 2020 House Republican 52.73% 55.67% 2.94% Democrat 46.57% 44.33% -2.24% 2018 Senate Republican 45.51% 52.00% 6.49% Democrat 53.83% 48.00% -5.83% 2018 House Republican 44.43% 55.00% 10.57% Democrat 54.19% 45.81% -8.38% 2016 Senate Republican 50.87% 60.00% 9.13% Democrat 49.13% 40.00% -9.13% 2016 House Republican 50.49% 59.60% 9.11% Democrat 48.76% 40.40% -8.36% unweightd avg Republican 49.15% 57.05% 7.90% Democrat 50.27% 43.09% -7.18% 7. I believe the criteria in the PA Constitution relating to compactness, contiguity and the effort to not split county and municipal boundaries can NOT be labelled as “neutral”, as I have heard some LRC members emphasize. 8. The reason is that Pennsylvania’s political geography results from actions taken and ordinances passed historically and are representative of the political parties and races that were in power (and able to vote) at the time. Disenfranchised groups from time immemorial have not had a fair say in this. Hence the current political geography cannot be said to be neutral as regards the current political parties and races. Since Pennsylvania has historically been Republican up until 2000, it can be inferred that the boundaries likely have been established to promote Republican advantage. 9. Since political geography and the resulting boundaries and shapes are not neutral, we must take that into account as we weigh compromises between Constitutional goals relating to political geography and the other mandated principles. In this regard, compliance with Voting Rights Act provisions, “one man one vote” principle, the partisan fairness and proportionality principle, and the basic principles of our democratic republic must not be subordinated to the Constitutional goals. It is worth recalling another part of the Pennsylvania Redistricting Advisory Council Redistricting Principles that states that the traditional [Constitutional criteria] “form a “floor” of protection against the dilution of votes in the creation of districts”. They are a floor, not a ceiling, as others have emphasized. 10. To show what I believe is a misstep in this regard, the splitting criterion in the preliminary Senate LRC plan has a “good” rating per Dave’s Redistricting, but the competitiveness criterion has a “bad” rating that is barely better than a “very bad” rating. This essentially says the LRC has given more much more weight to the splitting criteria. I believe this indicates you should make changes to the Senate map to achieve a higher competitive rating, equal to the splitting rating. 11. Also, the preliminary Senate LRC plan has a disproportionality score of 1.4% in favor of the Republicans, and based on this, will unfairly likely give Democrats 25 seats, depriving them of 1 seat they should have (per Dave’s redistricting analysis which indicates 26 would be appropriate). The average state map-wide Democratic two-party vote share is 52.46%, so reducing the disproportionality to zero would, and should, give the Democrats a statistically likely chance to have 26 Senate seats. 12. The Senate population deviation metric should be lowered to virtually zero (not 1.4%). 13. To summarize, the final LRC Senate map should be changed to eliminate the Republican bias currently embedded in the preliminary plan, and to become neutral or slightly Democratic leaning, to comply with all the redistricting requirements. Specific recommendations to make the maps fairly represent Pennsylvania’s new voting realities are: a. Adjust Senate map to lean slightly Democratic - where Democrats have a fair chance of winning 26 seats that the analyses overwhelmingly indicate to be fair. 14. Thank you for seriously considering citizen input!