Bullsh*t Is A New Netflix Quiz Show That's Useful To Describe AK Redistricting Board Majority Justifications Of Latest Plan

 In this show, the contestant has to answer a multiple choice trivia question. They can win up to $1million.  They have to convince a panel of three other contestants that they know the answer.  It's sort of mishmash between Jeopardy and To Tell The Truth.  

Alaska Redistricting Board Is A Contestant Before the
Alaska Superior and Supreme Court

The strategy, when they don't know the answer, seems to be to take some bits of truth and wrap them up in lies.  They may take a story about their childhood or their job, or education, that tells a story about why they know the answer.  So it's lies wrapped up with bits of truth to make it sound plausible.  

I'd like to propose that this is exactly what the Alaska Redistricting Board majority has done to justify its most recent map.  They've talked about their experiences ("I've lived in Eagle River and it's made up mainly of military and veterans and so it is a natural connection to JBER"), they've made assertion based on anecdotal evidence ("Eagle River High School wouldn't exist if it were not for JBER" or "Pairing downtown and JBER would be political gerrymandering").  

Bits of truth wrapped up in lies. Or lies wrapped up in bits of truth.  It's the same thing.  It's how people win up to $1 million on Bullsh*t and it's how the Redistricting Board's majority is hoping to win an extra Republican seat in the Alaska State Senate which ultimately could be worth way more than $1 million.  

In the next week or so I'm going to lay out the arguments of why I think this is true and how the Board majority have taken two perfectly natural pairings (the two Eagle River house districts (HD22 & HD24 together and JBER/Government Hill (HD 23 and downtown HD 17) and substituted two far less natural and less compatible districts (HD 22 and HD 7 - Hillside to Whittier) and HD 24 with HD 23.  [Note:  I'm using the district numbers in the November 8 plan because these are the numbers that were used in the Board meetings.  Some numbers were changed in the April 13 plan.]

Judge Thomas Matthews - the Superior Court judge who presided over the challenges to the November Proclamation Plan - and the Supreme Court justices who heard the appeal, all called out the majority Board members for gerrymandering in the first plan, which is why they had to revise the map.  

But in the lead up to the first plan, the majority didn't even try to justify their decision.  Political Gerrymandering had never been a reason for a court to reject a previous redistricting plan in Alaska.  They didn't think they had to justify what they were doing.  All they needed was a majority vote.  We even had Board member Marcum say clearly that the plan would give Eagle River an extra Senate seat. 

This time around, they've heard the courts' admonitions and have created elaborate (ie Bullsh*t) explanations to justify their new map.  

Let's pause here and look at where we are in the process now.

Judge Matthews remanded the plan back to the Board and told it to make changes to specific districts.  The Board did that - with a highly vocal minority disagreeing with the majority.  Judge Matthews now has to decide whether to accept the changes.  The original East Anchorage plaintiffs have filed objections to the judge arguing why he should not accept the remanded map.  

In addition, three residents of Girdwood, who have been put into a district with Eagle River in the newest map, have challenged the new plan.  

I know it's confusing.  

• East Anchorage is trying to influence the judge's decision about the remand itself.  
• The Girdwood folks are instead challenging the new plan.  The two are on different timelines.

The judge had originally hoped to get out a decision on the remand by this past Thursday, April 28.  If he agreed with the East Anchorage plaintiffs, then the Girdwood challenge would be moot because he would have disallowed the Eagle River with South Anchorage (including Girdwood.)

Instead of making a decision about the remand on Thursday, the judge offered a time line for people who want to challenge the new maps - he expedited the deadline so there would be time for a decision by the Supreme Court before the June 1 deadline for candidates to file to run for office.

He also ordered the Redistricting Board to give the Girdwood plaintiffs all the Board's emails.  

One possibility is that the Judge wanted something more concrete than the East Anchorage plaintiffs gave him, before ruling gerrymandering again.  It's clear the judge believes the Board majority is capable of gerrymandering, because he ruled they did the first time.  Asking for the emails may be a sign that he's hoping there will be something more explicit that he can base his ruling on.  Meanwhile, he's trying to figure out how to decide.  

I've been following the Board since December 2020.  I've followed all their meetings since then either remotely or in person. I've read the documents, the court cases, the past Supreme Court cases. I've written (not counting this post) 120 posts about this 2020 round of Alaska Redistricting.  (You can see an annotated index of the posts here.  It's also among the tabs at the top of the blog.)  

In the next week or two, I will try to make the argument why I think the Board majority's explanations are Bullsh*t.  Much of the groundwork is already up in previous posts.  I plan to explore the idea of Contiguity briefly.  It's not part of the Bullsh*t claim, but it's something the Courts should think about.  I'll also look at what any non-partisan, objective reviewer would call "natural" in terms of the pairing choices that Board had in remand.  I will look at the arguments made by the majority Board members and show why they don't hold up.  

I'll look at how they used assertions based on bits of truth and puffs of hot air to justify their blatant gerrymandering decisions.  How they didn't make any kind of serious comparisons between competing options, they only used 'arguments' (anecdotes mostly) that supported what they wanted or disparaged what they didn't want.  

And I'll look at the party credentials of the majorityBoard members and the map maker (Randy Ruedrich) whose map was used.  

The Netflix description of Bullsh*t is:

"Contestants strive to correctly answer difficult trivia questions.  And when they can't, they simply move to plan B, lying through their teeth."

That's a pretty good descriptor of the Board's majority:  the strive to justify their new map as fair and not political.  And when they can't, they simply move to plan B, lying through their teeth.

Bullsh*tting goes back at least as far as the Serpent in the Garden of Eden.  The Emperor's New Clothes tells the story of how people can doubt what their own eyes tell them.  The man who tried to overturn the last US presidential election has made the art of deception a key part of the Republican Party.  

Even if the emails don't show us the same sort of explicit evidence that Mark Meadows' text messages are revealing, the circumstantial evidence in this case is more than overwhelming.  

A final note.  People who know me well and people who know me because they read the blog regularly, know that I rarely declare something true or false as baldly as I am doing here.  I only do so when I have reviewed something thoroughly.  When I've looked at all the plausible alternative explanations.  And even then I leave an escape hatch just in case I've overlooked something and it turns out I'm wrong.  I'm sticking my neck out here because I don't see a shred of believable evidence that I'm wrong.  The only concession I'll make is that the majority Board members - particularly Marcum - actually believe the stories they have concocted.  But that doesn't make them true.