Blogging The Redistricting Trial Is Not A Sustainable Activity

[Note:  I'm wiped.  Please excuse typos and other problems. I need some sleep.] 

The trial goes from about 9am to 4:30, with a morning break, lunch break and afternoon break.  If we're lucking there will be a technical glitch (today they had trouble getting the audio to work on a video) and I had time to just let my brain drift.  

So, it's Wednesday which means our weekly video call with the SF grandkids.  I've got about 14 pages of notes of today's trial which would take at least 90 minutes to clean up enough to post as rough.  And I'm not sure many people would get much out of it.  

So I'm going to give reactions again.  Thoughts.  [Turns out there are two main points.  And if you get bored during the first one, then scroll down to number 2.  It's a whole new ball game.  

Best part of today's trial for me:  Testimony of Miranda Wright.  

She was born at her family's winter camp at Mud River where her family traveled to by boat from Nulato.  Now she lives in Fairbanks.  She was asked about her education by Lee Baxter, one of the Board's attorneys, "Educational background?"

Wright:  Life experience, construction.  She worked with her husband.  Then she got a degree in anthropology because of her interest in the culture of her people.  They had stories in books in the library about folklore>  She didn't view them as folklore.  They were part of her life.  She did her Masters  thesis on Nulato.  She talked about the ties between people along the Yukon and the Kuskokwim Rivers.  How there used to be lots of villages on the flats south of Nulato.  It was there homeland.  Small game, fish.  Then the pandemics came and everything was lost, including many of the people and villages.  The linguistic history shows ties to Holy Cross.  She talked about MTNT (McGrath, Takotna, Nikolai, and Telida), GASH (Grayling, Anvik, Shageluk, and Holy Cross), and GYL (The Gana-A’Yoo, Limited). 

Baxter:  What do they all have in common?

Wright:  All Athabaskan speaking.  Some variation in dialects, which happens when you're spread out like that.  Overarching kinship structure that unites us as one people of the Athabaskan nation.  Belief structures similar, How we prepare food is similar.  Intermarriages.

Interesting as it might be, you're saying, why are we hearing about Alaska Native anthropology at the Redistricting Trial?   Before I attempt to answer that, let's look at a map of the Board's House District 36R (R is the Senate seat it's in).  Nulato, is at the white #1 (middle to the left)  

For days now, the Valdez witness have been pummeled with questions like "how are Holy Cross (#2) and Valdez (#3) socially-economically integrated?  SEI is one of the criteria for combining communities into a house district.  Valdez (I know the 3 is hard to see - it's bottom to the right of center) has been arguing for a map that connects them up the Richardson Highway.  Even, if necessary to the huge purple district.  Valdez is in the Board's D29-O (pinkish lower right).  They've been complaining they aren't SEI with Mat-Su.  Valdez has been grilled about choices they made in their proposed map.  I've been thinking, "Wow, they're being grilled on how they justify their decisions, but no one has grilled the Board members how they made their decisions." (That actually began today with Nicole Borromeo being asked fairly gentle questions compared to what Valdez witnesses have endured.  It will continue tomorrow when Board members testify.)

Redistricting is an art where you have to balance (in Alaska) Compactness,  Contiguity, Socio-Economic Integrity, and getting 40 districts all as close to the same population.  Since there is no simple test for SEI, the lawyers are setting up all sorts of exaggerated tests and demonstrations of SEI and bringing in people to verify what is and is not SEI.  

The map above is the Board's D36.  This is, according to the redistricting expert, Kimball Brace, who testified yesterday and today, the largest electoral district in the country and would be something like the seventh or eighth largest state in the US.  

The Doyon Coalition that closely followed the redistricting process and submitted its own map for the process, and whose attorney, Tanner Amdur-Clark, is the Intervenor attorney at this trial (he's at the top right in the picture with Miranda Wright and Judge Matthews)STOP  That sentence was getting away from me.  Doyon pushed hard for a district that would pull all the Doyon villages together.  But there aren't enough people for a full district so they joined with Ahtna to get this huge D36R.  Including Ahtna is why there's a protuberance of dark blue (D36) between D29 (which includes Valdez) and D30.  That incursion into the Denali Borough pulls Cantwell - an Ahtna village - into D36.  

I also have Holy Cross numbered (2) and Glennallen listed (it wasn't on the original map so I had to write it in, because today the Valdez side returned the pummeling asking what was did Glennallen and Holy Cross have in common.  Do the live together?  Work together? Play together?  If not why are they in the same district?  

Have I lost you yet?  This is all the simple stuff so far.  You thinking you don't need to get into the more complicated stuff?  You're probably right.  Part of me thinks we have attorneys splitting hairs and then splitting them further and further.  They're trying to logically, almost quantitatively prove something that is qualitative and the more you work to prove it the more ridiculous it gets.  And that's one of the reasons I'm not trying to clean up my notes enough to drop them in here at the bottom.  It's just not worth it.  

But that is why I got to hear Miranda Wright's story.  She's part of proving that there are good reasons for all those villages in D36 to be together.  And I have to say she seems like an incredible woman who it would be fascinating to have dinner with.  

2.  Potentially the most impactful revelation at the trial today was the fact that the plaintiffs' attorneys have gotten access to at least some of the electronic communications between Board Members.  This is stuff the Board's attorney Matt Singer fought hard to prevent.  Whether they could be used went all the way up to the Supreme Court and Judge Matthews has been reviewing them to decide which can be released and which are protected by attorney-client privilege.  

Board member Nicole Borromeo was on the stand today and Valdez attorney Brena put up a number of texts she exchanged with people.  The Doyon attorney Tanner Amdur-Clark was texting her during Board work sessions about things I wrote about above.  Someone else was lobbying to get Fairbanks 'unlocked' because they were overpopulated but Board chair Binkley had decided from early on that Fairbanks houses should all be in Fairbanks.  It wasn't until the very end, when it seemed no longer possible, that he finally relented.  The Valdez folks are saying if that decision hadn't been locked in from the beginning, there would have been more flexibility for Valdez to have a better district.  

The question I'm sure everyone is asking is this:  What sort of messages are there between the three GOP appointed Board members and their friends about the Eagle River pairings?  There's good reason attorney Singer didn't want this information out.  It's a whole new world of open government now than it was ten years ago.  I have lots more thoughts, but the court is in session again in eleven hours.  

Tomorrow, when the Board members are testifying we could see more texts and emails.