Supreme Court Tomorrow At 9am: Partial Preview

My sense is that those who have been following the Redistricting Board and the Superior Court challenges won't have trouble following the arguments tomorrow.  For others, giving quick overviews here isn't easy.  I have tried to do that with some of the cases in earlier posts.  

Key information:  9am at the Alaska Supreme Court  Friday March 18, 2022 9am. Much easier (since they are limiting the gallery to 50 people) is to watch it live at www.ktoo.org/gaveland .

You can also check out the filings in the Docket here.

You particularly want to look at the Responses (Numbers 33-40).  These are the arguments of the different parties.  

33 - State of Alaska - The State isn't arguing for against the maps or the judge's decisions about the maps. The State  has two concerns here:

1.  That the precedent set by the Court regarding the importance of listening to what the public has to say ("if you didn't intend to listen to what the public said, why hold all the hearings?).  The State is making an argument that that only applies to the Redistricting Boards and not other state boards.

2.  Also, the Court's decisions about attorney-client privilege and the Open Meetings Act should also only apply to the Redistricting Board and not other State Boards.

34 - Matsu-Susitna Borough - challenged (along with Valdez) District 29 which put Valdez in with Palmer and Wasilla suburbs.  Matsu-Susistna makes its points easy to read.

• The Court "requires remand to the Board to comply with the Constitution'
• Agreement with the Court's finding of violations of the Open Meeting Act
• Court was correct in its determinations regarding discovery

35 - Alaska Redistricting Board - Defending its decisions and challenging the conclusions of Judge Mathews they disagree with and supporting those they agree with

36.  City of Valdez - See comments below.

37.  Municipality of Skagway - Agreeing with the judge on public input and disagreeing with the judge that Skagway is Socio-Economically Integrated with the Mendenhall Valley.

38.  Felisa Wilson - This is the Anchorage case that challenged the pairing of the two Eagle River House seats with Muldoon in one Senate seat and JBER and downtown Anchorage in another Senate seat.  The judge ruled in their favor and the Board is challenging that.  This is a harder case to follow because it focuses on violations of principles of law such as due process, arguing that the Board went from transparent and then when it came time for Senate pairings it went opaque.  It argues that the East Anchorage plaintiffs couldn't make their case stronger because the Board withheld information until the very last minute - some of that including racial data about the voters in the Muldoon district.  As an observer of the Board and then the trial, it clearly appeared to me that the Board's strategy at the trial was to stall and delay.  See this January 19 post:   AK Redistricting Pre-Trial Hearing - Board Strategy Is Clear And Working.  

39.  Doyon Limited - Doyon led a coalition of Native Corporations in monitoring the Redistricting Board throughout the process, including creating their own proposed redistricting map.  The were pretty successful in getting all the Doyon and Ahtna villages into one district - 36.  They are here to defend District 36, particularly against Valdez' claims that the Board put Native Corporation goals ahead of the Constitutional requirements for creating the districts.  

Second reminder:  These were very quick grabs from the documents.  You can look at them yourselves for more details.  I'm sure all the attorneys would be rolling their eyes at my very brief takes.  

You can skim through these at the link.  But here's a little more depth into the Valdez case.  

Valdez - The basic argument seems to be that by committing strongly to the Doyon plan to get all the Doyon villages into one district (the new 36), the Board a) used a non constitutional criterion (getting all of Doyon together) and b) caused Valdez to be in a district that it is not socio-economically integrated with.  

Basically they say that the focus on creating a "Doyon District" resulted in a district that is not compact, not SEI (socio-economically integrated).  And the impact on Valdez was to put it into a district that had serious problems.  Thus, by using nonconktititonal criteria (getting all the Doyon villages together into D-36), the Board ended up with an unconstitutional Valdez district (29).

There's more detail, but that's the biggest argument.  And it's pretty clear that there was a lot of pressure to do that.  Doyon had a group of Native Corporations and money to create their own alternative map.  And Doyon attorney Tanner Amdur-Clark was allowed to act as an Intervenor attorney during the trial.  That is not to say that there is anything wrong with wanting to get all the Doyon (and Ahtna) villages into one district.  But that is not one of the constitutional requirements for putting the districts together.  Attorney Brena is trying to convince the Supreme Court that by locking in District 36, the Board created 

• an unnecessarily large (not Compact) district
• a district that was not Socio-Economically Integrated (even though it has all those Native villages, the population is 70% non-Native) and
• Put Valdez into a district which in which it has serious conflicts and thus whose interests in the legislature would be overwhelmed by Mat-Su portion of the district

[Note:  I scanned the brief fairly quickly, but I read the conclusions more carefully.  I'm just trying to give readers what stood out to me as the main thrust of the argument.  You can read it for yourself in the link below.]

From the VALDEZ-DETTER’S CORRECTED PETITION FOR REVIEW March 3, 2022, here's the conclusion of their argument::

"VII. CONCLUSION

The Board chose to prioritize the nonconstitutional goals of its individual members

over the consistent application of the constitutional requirements throughout the

redistricting process. Time-and-again the Board deferred to the priorities of the individual member from the geographic area under discussion. This is simply not the constitutional process the Board is required to undertake, and, as a result, the process failed to produce constitutionally compliant outcomes.

The Board set aside its constitutional obligations to establish compact and socio-economically integrated districts when it prioritized the nonconstitutional goal ofcreating a “Doyon” or “Doyon-Ahtna” district (District 36). The Board’s favored treatment of the Native voters in these villages, which constitute less than 30 percent of District 36, over all other voters cannot possibly survive constitutional scrutiny.

The Doyon district is not compact. It would be the third-largest state in our union. It is not so large because Alaska is a vast state with low population densities, as may sometimes justify a larger district, but because the Board set aside the constitutional requirements for establishing house districts and instead decided to (1) establish VRA [Voting Rights Act] districts early in the process in direct violation of the Hickel process, locking in portions of the Doyon district’s boundaries; (2) inconsistently and arbitrarily apply ANSCA boundaries to artificially separate Native villages along the lower Yukon drainage, while ignoring other ANSCA boundaries altogether; (3) form a noncompact horseshoe shape around the population of Fairbanks in an effort to keep Fairbanks intact in deference to Chair Binkley; and (4) establish and advance a goal of maximizing the voting power of far-flung Native villages (that are currently in four different districts) by combing them into a single district, even though the district was over 70 percent non-Native. The Board then further violated compactness by adding two strange appendages to capture 30 Ahtna shareholders in Cantwell and to capture the predominately non-Native population of Glennallen, breaking two borough boundaries in the process.

The Doyon district is also not relatively socio-economically integrated. There is no substantive or creditable evidence in the record suggesting the communities along the lower Yukon and those along the Richardson Highway are relatively socio-economically integrated at all, much less to the maximum degree practicable.

Since statehood, every governor and board has properly applied the constitutional standards of article VI, section 6 to place Valdez in a house district with the Richardson Highway communities, with the Prince William Sound communities, or with both. The Board in this case has orphaned the voters of Valdez from their closest neighbors and placed them completely in a district with voters with whom they do not work, live, or share common concerns. The Board took this action as a default in order to achieve thenonconstitutional goals it had already committed to achieve.

The Board’s actions ignored the public process, which overwhelmingly suggested Valdez should not be districted, let alone exclusively paired, with the Mat-Su Borough. The public process yielded voluminous and near unanimous comments in favor of Valdezbeing placed with the people its voters live, work, and share common interests with along the Richardson Highway, as it has been for decades, in what has been framed by the courts as “the most strongly integrated economic corridor in the state, the pipeline corridor, the Richardson Highway corridor from the south region of the North Star Borough to Valdez.”274

Rather than ensuring District 29 met the constitutional requirements for a house district, the Board chose to protect its nonconstitutional priorities and reach out to everyone it could for justification supporting pairing Valdez exclusively with the Mat-Su Borough for the first time in history. In doing so, the Board stretched this Court’s prior authority beyond recognition and advanced theories that diminish if not entirely abrogate the limitations to the Board’s discretion set forth in article VI, section 6 of the Alaska Constitution.

The Board did not map, much less look hard at establishing (1) a Richardson Highway house district; (2) a Valdez, Seward, and Kodiak house district by shifting 274 In re 2011 Redistricting Cases, 2013 WL 6074059 at *13 (emphasis added).

Cordova into Southeast; or (3) an Anchorage and Valdez house district. The Board chose not to even look at the maps already prepared by Member Marcum because they would require modification to the VRA districts and Doyon district in order to form a Richardson

Highway or Prince William Sound district. In addition, the Board discouraged Member Marcum from mapping an Anchorage and Valdez district altogether. Any of these alternatives would have resulted in more compact and socio-economically integrated house districts throughout Alaska, which the Board could have considered if they had properly and consistently applied the constitutional requirements. This Court should enforce these requirements and remand this matter back to the Board for consistent application when evaluating the viable alternatives it chose not to consider for the voters of Valdez.

Some of the parties that have filed briefs (Calista and the State of Alaska) have done to support or oppose concepts raised in this case.  Calista is arguing against Valdez' argument that ANCSA boundaries are not appropriate to use for redistricting.  ????   And the State of Alaska is arguing that the broader than normal interpretation of the importance of listening to the public ruling by Judge Matthews should not be extended to other public bodies.  (Check if there are other issues)

Calista is not challenging the judge's decision about the Calista region and the State is not advocating one way or the other about the maps, or even the Judge's standard for listening to public testimony for redistricting.