AK Redistricting Trial Day3: Including The Picasso of Gerrymandering

[As the judge keeps saying, we're all doing the best we can.  I feel like I should be doing more than I am, but I do want to get to bed so I can be up for court tomorrow. This should give you a sense of what happened today, but it's not complete.  And my notes just aren't good enough to post.]

In some way a trial is like a football or baseball game.  First one team may be doing well and pulling ahead, and then the other team scores. 

I started wrting during the lunch break, but it wasn't long enough, by the end of the day the other team was scoring points.  

But this is NOT a jury trial.  What might influence jurors isn't necessarily going to move a judge who has a lot more information than a jury would and is determined to render a verdict that is not only 'right', but that will be supported enough that a likely appeal to the Supreme Court will uphold his decision.  

Judge Matthews continues to convey a reasonable tone balancing the various demands of the attorneys, keeping one eye carefully on the clock, and praising everyone for the work they are doing under incredible pressure.  When he rejects an attorney's request, he does it with understanding and a brief explanation of his reasoning.  He's giving attorneys some leeway on timing because of the  time pressure.  He's trying to balance a break for one attorney with an equal break for the other.  He keeps telling them he's trying to gather the information he needs in order to make a good decision that he can support with facts.  

Here's what I wrote at lunch break:

Quick Thoughts During the Lunch Break:

1 Witnesses

Duval upper middle

Both witnesses were strong in different ways.  Nathan Duval, who works for City of Valdez, wasarticulate and able to say what he had to say succinctly.  He was able to voice what seems like an important point that hadn't been adequately discussed before:  How Valdez and Mat-Su have conflicting interests over ports and competing for money for their ports.  In the current district, Mat-Su has 40% of the population and getting to see the representative and Senator is hard.  The Senator doesn't come to Valdez.  Duval talks to them by phone or email.  Also mentioned they go to the Fairbanks reps and senators because they have more in common with Valdez and more likely to advocate for them.  

Pierce upper right

Sheri Pierce, the City Clerk for some 30 years, was not as articulate, but she knew what she wanted to say and despite a relatively silly set of questions from Tanner Amdur-Clark* asking about the Socio Economic ties between Valdez and various isolated villages, she didn't lose her cool and was able to get back to her main points:

• Valdez when included in a district along the Richardson Highway was more likely to be better represented than when paired the way the new district pairs Valdez with Mat-Su.  Even if there were some places that were not very socio-economically compatible with all the  communities.  
• The maps she preferred - like v1, or even Valdez option 1 - were maps that better met Valdez' needs and she wasn't looking at how they met other people's needs.  Valdez wasn't responsible for meeting the needs of the rest of the state, the Board was.  When she was saying she liked those maps she was specifically talking about how they handled Valdez and not the rest of the state.  
• She also voiced the concern that the Board was using the trope that Valdez was hard to fit into a district (and I might be accused of falling for that and perpetuating it in this post, subtitled "How do deal with a problem like Valdez".)  She said the previous Boards had solved the problem, and while their current district is paired with Mat-Su, it also includes the nearby Richardson Highway communities.  40% of the district being Mat-Su voters was bad, but with 76% Mat-Su voters this time, it's worse. And it's like that, she claimed, because the Board waited til the end, when all the other districts were pretty much locked in, to figure out what to do with Valdez.  

Needless Lawyer Stuff

I've been, up to now, impressed with Tanner Amdur-Clark, the attorney who worked with the Doyon Coalition of Native related groups to come up with one of the third party maps.   But he seemed more focused on winning today than reaching an understanding of the issues.  He is, understandably, concerned that Alaska Natives are fairly represented in the legislature.  But it isn't an either/or situation.  He asked Pierce a string of questions about the socio-economic integration between Valdez and Cold Foot and Allakaket.  A couple of questions would have made his point but he kept at it over and over as though he'd caught her in a terrible inconsistency and he was going to make her suffer.  But I thought that not only was this line of questioning hollow, but it was based on a dubious assumption:  That the Valdez Option 1 map was intended to be an accurate map for the whole state. Or that Valdez was required to provide map of the whole state if they waned to give the Board feedback on what they wanted the Valdez district to look like.

There were valid points to make about Valdez' preferred maps having some questionable socio-economic pairings.  And it's also valid to point out that if they complain, they need to understand the Board has to make compromises somewhere and the maps that Pierce preferred had problems for other people.  But he piled on and tried to make her look terrible.  

Pierce explained that Valdez Option 1 map didn't pretend to be a final map since it doesn't even have 40 districts.  It was drawn up quickly, using the Board's online map making tool, to give the Board a sense of what kind of district they preferred,  

The judge understands all these points and pushing hard on Pierce isn't going to gain Amdur-Clark any points.  He'd have been much better off, in my opinion, making his points without trying to make her look like a fool.  

Singer, on the other hand, asked questions about similar issues, but did it in a much more respectful way..  

What Valdez Gained This Morning

• Better establishing the close ties between Valdez and Fairbanks that result in representatives who understand and are aligned on issues that are dominant for Valdez -  on oil gas issues and port issues.  With Mat-Su, the witnesses explained, there is competition because of Mat-Su's  Point McKenzie's port aspirations and Mat-Su's interest in a competing gas pipeline.  And with the new district having 75% of its voters in Mat-Su, Valdez' interests just won't be represented strongly or at all in Juneau.  
• Cleaned up weak points in court filings.  In an earlier post after I looked at the Valdez court case, I noticed they claimed that maps v1, v2, and v3 were all ok with Valdez.  But v4 was a surprise and they didn't have time to respond.  In fact v4 came out the same time as v3 which they thought was ok.  
• Today, Brena added a new approach here.  
• The v4 map boundaries on the wall maps at the Valdez public hearing weren't clear enough to see that the Richardson Highway communities had been cut out
• The v3 and v4 maps weren't the maps completed in the 30 days time frame the Board has to get the maps out.  They were revisions of v1 and v2 after a lot of outcry over those maps.  But v3 and v4, not v1 and v2, were the maps that went on the road trip.  I understand the Board's view that they merely made adjustments based on the feedback with better maps for the road trips.  But Brena got out the points that
• that the Board was required to get the proclamation maps out in 30 days, but the v3 and v4 maps that they used to take around the state for comment weren't completed in that 30 day period, so
• the maps they took around the state weren't the proclamation maps and there wasn't the 60 days needed for the public to review the v3 and v4 maps.  This is a technical argument which may or may not appeal to the court, but it is, technically, a violation of the Constitutional requirements.  And it allows him to abandon the false claim that v4 only came out at the very end.  

There was more, but it got very tedious.  

The afternoon session was with national Redistricting Expert Kimball Brace.  Matt Singer in redirect pointed out Mr. Brace had been on the Jon Stewart show and was known as the Picasso of Gerrymandering.    

Brace and IL district

Brace came down hard on the Redistricting Board.  (Yesterday I posted my thoughts on how the Board was severely outgunned by the third party groups when it came to preparation before the Census data arrived and basic mapping skill level.  Glad I put that up before I heard this testimony.) 

It's getting late and I've been at the screen here most of the day.  There was a fair bit of jargon  - and I thought attorney Stone did a good job of stopping him and asking him to explain, but this is also a very experienced presenter who knows how to avoid yes-no answers and go on to explain instead.  So let me try to hit some highlights.  There will be more redirect of him tomorrow.  

Basically he said 

• the Board had started preparing very late in the game and weren't prepared to do the mapping when the data arrived August 12.  He acknowledged that Alaska has a very short required turnaround time of 30 days to get the initial map out.  
• they had race data turned on early on and got the Native districts settled first which is contrary to the Hickel decision to do the Alaska requirements before doing the Voting Rights Act adjustments
• when he looked at the TIGER files there was a discrepancy in the population numbers for districts 11-29 and 31-33.  He thought this might have happened when the adjusted the numbers on the districts
• there were issues of packing some of the Native districts
• pointed out how the ANCSA borders seemed to be used rather than Borough borders

These are pretty major issues.  The Board's attorney, Singer, started off by raising issues about whether he was a hired gun, by asking his salary ($500/hour) and pointing out the Picasso quote and giving examples of what Singer thought were questionable districts.  Brace remained cheerful throughout.  Then he started challenging him about when the Board actually started mapping and some of the inferences he made based on the trails left behind on the files.  He also raised questions about taking Nicole Borromeo's response to a question out of context, pointing out he'd pulled together comments from various pages.  Brace's response was he was trying to put together a response that was spread out over several pages and he had footnotes with directions to which pages each quote came from.  He also questioned him over the packing charge, pointing out that his own (Brace's) Native districts were only a couple of percent different from the Board's.  

Amdur-Clark,one of the intervenors - focused more on Brace's lack of understanding of rural Alaskan culture and the differences between different cultures.  This sounded similar to the questioning Amdur-Clark did of Sheri Pierce in the morning as he asked a series of questions about different rural communities and whether Brace knew what language was spoken, what traditional foods different areas hunted, the difference between Coastal and Interior tribes.  To a certain extent this was more justified with a certified National expert coming in to Alaska and dividing up the state, particularly the rural areas, into districts.  But Amdur-Clark was taking too much pleasure, in my mind, making Brace squirm.  Brace is a professional and didn't lose his composure or  claim to know things he didn't know - it wouldn't have worked anyway - and finally said "I'm an expert on redistricting, not Alaska Native groups."  This was very different from his explanation of the the district he'd carved out in Chicago [see red district map above] where he explained there were Puerto Rican Hispanics to the north and Mexican Hispanics to the south with African Americans in the middle.  He had no sense of those kinds of nuances in Alaska.  

This will continue tomorrow.