Redistricting Board Awards $400,000 Attorney Fees To East Anchorage Plaintiffs

James Brooks reported in the Alaska Beacon and APRN that the Alaska Redistricting Board met Friday October 13 to approve a $400,000 payment to the East Anchorage plaintiffs who challenged the Eagle River Senate pairings and prevailed in the Supreme Court.  

I only learned about it when I read the Sunday Anchorage Daily News last week.  

So essentially I'll refer you to the link above for details since I didn't get to attend.  

The email alerts the Redistricting Board sent out to subscribers for a couple of years, were shut down after the final map was approved.  

There are still some possible settlements out there. The East Anchorage and Girdwood plaintiffs (who challenged the second Eagle River Senate pairings and also prevailed and received $115,000) are the two that had major victories and got settlements for their legal fees.

I'd note that the first and second Eagle River pairings were decided by a 3-2 vote, with the majority made up of Republicans and the minority making dramatic objections and predictions that the decision would be overturned by the Supreme Court.  

But Alaskans are the ones that bear the costs, not those who made the widely opposed decision.  

Legal expenses have been the largest part of the Board's budget.  Some of that is anticipated by the way the Constitution sets up the appeal process - basically Alaskans are given 30 days to challenge the Board's map.  They do this by filing objection with the Superior Court and any disputes (usually all of them) get decided in the Supreme Court.  

But as I said above, this was clearly a partisan gerrymandering attempt by the Republicans on the Board that went against all (non-partisan) common sense.  So much of the legal expenses paid to the Board's attorney* and the winning plaintiffs ($515,000) could have been avoided.  

I looked at the Board's budget a year ago and hope to look at the budget closer to it being final.

*It's harder to determine what part of the Board's attorney payments went to defend the Eagle River decisions.  Should we count the first map defense?  Some of it, but there were other plaintiffs as well who had other (non-Eagle River Senate pairing) objections.  Definitely we can count expenses after the Board majority passed the second Eagle River pairing, which I figure as at least $150,000.  See the Budget post.

Tackling Alaska Supreme Court Redistricting Opinion

 

The first Supreme Court order regarding the 2010 Alaska Redistricting Board cases was issued on March 25, 2022.  It confirmed some of the Superior Court's decisions - mainly the Eagle River Senate seats - but not others - Valdez and Matsu complaints (though it agreed with them on the Cantwell appendage) and Skagway complaint.  The Board incorporated the Court's recommendations except in the case of the Eagle River Senate seats.  They offered a new map which also split the Eagle River house districts into two different Senate seats.  

Another on May 25, 2022 that ordered the Board to adopt Plan 2 as an Interim Plan so that candidates for the 2022 elections would know what districts they were in.  The court rejected the Board's new Eagle River Senate seat split and ordered the Board through the superior Court to approve plan 2 (which combined the two Eagle River house seats into one Senate seat.)

"IN THE MATTER OF THE 2021 THE STATE OF ALASKA REDISTRICTING CASES" was issued on April 21, 2023.  

I've been slowly plodding through the Opinion.  I'm not an attorney, but I have been following the Board and the subsequent court proceedings closely since December 2020.

In this post I want to simply describe the process I'm using to review what the justices said and the implications for future redistricting boards - particularly the 2030 Board.  In an academic paper this would be called the methodology section, though that's probably to generous a term for what I'm offering here.  I'm briefly explaining how I'm going about this.  

Step 1:  Quickly go through the text to see 

• what issues they covered
• what decisions they made about the current plan and the Board 
• (to remand the case through the Superior Court to the Board and have the Board either approve the Interim Plan as the Permanent Plan or tell the Court why it shouldn't be the Permanent Plan and offer alternatives.  
• to clarify that after approval the public still has the opportunity to challenge it)

Step 2:  Using the Court's headings, create an outline of the plan (which you can see here)

Step 3A:  Read through the Opinion more carefully with the Outline alongside and mark things that seem important on both the Opinion and the Outline.  Here are some examples of pages I marked up.

Okay.  This is not intended to be a tease.  But this is taking a while and I want to show you why.  Issues are raised in one section and then, sometimes, in another.  And maybe this intro, will make the final post(s) easier to understand.  Probably wishful thinking.

Step 3B:  As I did this, I also started to draft notes about what I think might end up being important.  These are tentative notes which I hope will become clearer (to me)  as I write them and then go back to the opinion to check if there are other comments that support or challenge what I've written.  

I call these Step 3A and 3B because I did them more or less at the same time, but they are different activities.  For example, here are some of my tentative notes (3B): 

"There seem to be several different kinds of issues

1. Procedural legal issues that seem to relate to how the court makes decisions, but don’t seem to set precedents (other than legal procedural ones in case of a challenge) for future redistricting boards to take careful consideration of.
2. Clarifications of past court decisions which will be important to future Boards  - These are the key issues I’m looking for and hoping I understand correctly
1. Partisan Gerrymandering
2. Public Participation and degree to which it should be considered by the Board - meaning of 'hard look'
3. Clarification of the related terms:
1. Socio-economic Integration
2. Communities of interest
3. Politically salient class
4. Equal protection
5. Kenai Peninsula neutral factors test.
3. Reasoned Decision making - Board didn’t show reasoned decision-making for splitting ER"

Step 4:  This is still ahead of me.  I need to expand my notes on the important issues and then try to look at all the ways the court discussed each issue.  When they said it applied.  When they said it didn't.  When they offered similar concepts and distinguished between them, etc.  

Step 5:  Review my previous post(s) which discusses the legal issues that, given the Board's actions and their attorney's public advice, I thought needed to be clarified by the Court and see which of my concerns were addressed.  

Step 6:  Try to take all those notes and create a post (and now I'm thinking several posts, maybe different posts on different issues).  I'm also thinking I need to talk to some lawyers about this as well.  

Why does this matter? 

Future Boards need to know what the ground rules are for creating Alaska house and senate districts so they can create maps that future courts will find proper and legal.  And they might even avoid future litigation.  

For example when I pointed out to the 2010 Board attorney Michael White that it appeared that some of the districts appeared to be political gerrymandering, he smiled at me as though I were a little dim, and said, no maps have ever been thrown out because of gerrymandering.  

And I suspect that some of the Board members may have heard similar stories.  

But one thing that is clear from the Courts' 2022/23 rulings is that gerrymandering is unconstitutional in Alaska.  Will that stop attempts to gerrymander in the future?  Probably not.  But Boards will have to cover their tracks better than this Board did when they do gerrymander.  

This year, Board attorney Matt Singer took the Board into executive session to explain redistricting law in the Constitution, constitutional convention, and past court cases.  Michael White did that session in 2011 in public and I think that Singer used a pretty broad interpretation of attorney-client privilege to justify briefing the Board privately on these issues. We don't know what he told them.  I'd note that the Superior and Supreme Court agree.  

But we do know that Singer's mantra throughout the process was "All areas within a Borough or City boundary are Socio-Economically Integrated."  The Court is clearly saying in this decision that while that is technically true, there are other similar, but different concepts - like 'community of interest' - that also have to be considered, even inside of a single Borough.  

Ideally, I can come up with a guide to the rules for future Boards and for citizens that will be useful in 2030.  I would hope that others would do the same thing, because I may well be missing things or misinterpreting them.  

However The Night Ends, Remember These Two Things

 1.  However things turn out, remember that more people will have voted for Democratic candidates than Republican.  Only a Senate that gives small states (Wyoming and Alaska both have under 1,000,000 populations) the same number of Senators as large states (California has almost 40 million and New York has 20 million) and gerrymandered House maps cause the outcome to seem close. 

2.  Whatever the results, we must continue the struggle for respect, decency, understanding, and democracy.  No gloating if the results are good, no giving up if they aren't.  

The 2024 election begins Monday.  Lots of people have to talk to people about their values and where they came from and listen to others do the same.  Here's one path forward:

What is going to happen in these midterms? And what will it take for the pro-freedom movement to defeat American fascism?

Join @anatosaurus and me for this @nytopinion Twitter Space today at 12:30 pm ET.https://t.co/W9xLbOYjK4

— THE PERSUADERS by Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) November 7, 2022

I worked at a polling place today from 10:30 to 2:30.  Everyone was cordial to everyone.  Even when a ballot got jammed in the machine and people had to wait, they were calm and reasonable.  (I did have home made chocolate chip cookies as compensation for the wait to fix the machine.)

Click to enlarge

Alaska has great I VOTED stickers.  The blue Alaska flag stickers and then some alternate stickers designed by kids.  

AK Redistricting: About that 2002 Eagle River to South Anchorage House District Singer Keeps Talking About

 The Supreme Court Docket for the Redistricting case is adding new documents.  

The Board has two major documents.  

• Motion to Stay Trial Court Order; Motion to Expedite Consideration of Motion to Stay
• Petition for Review

The first document is seven pages.  The second is an expansion on the first document and is 47 paged.  

I've read the first one fairly closely and skimmed the second one.  In this post I want to make two observations.  

From the Motion To Stay Trial Court Order

Throughout the redistricting process and again in the court hearings, Board majority members and Singer have insisted that previous court rulings have affirmed the constitutionality of combining Eagle River and South Anchorage/Hillside in a single district.  So this time I took Singer's quotes and checked on that Court decision he cites.  As I read it, the claims are exaggerated and misleading.  Let's look.  

Singer writes:

"Unlike the prior round of litigation, where the superior court identified regional

partisanship in pairing South Eagle River with South Muldoon, the superior court

departs from the framework it previously adopted with a rambling decision that fails to

articulate what a constitutional “community of interest” is or a legitimate basis for

invalidating a district that this Court has previously held was compact, contiguous, and socio-economically integrated.7"

So, let's look at Singer's footnote 7.

"7 As Judge Rindner observed, "respect for neighborhood boundaries is an admirable goal," but "it is not constitutionally required and must give way to other legal requirements." Therefore, the districts containing the Eagle River area are not unconstitutional in any respect." 

First, Judge Rindner was NOT talking about 2021 Senate District F. He was talking about 2002 House District 32.  We'll get back to this point shortly.

Second, Singer ignores the implications of "must give way to other legal requirements."  In the 2002 case, those other legal requirements were about having deviations that were too high.  So, while neighborhood boundaries are "an admirable goal," if they mean the district has too high or too low a deviation, then you have to find other alternatives. In 2002 deviation meant neighborhood boundaries needed to be sacrificed. In the 2022 case, those other legal requirements include no partisan gerrymandering.  

Singer continues:

"The superior court also ignores In re 2001 Redistricting Cases, where this Court rejected attempts to Balkanize the Municipality of Anchorage into separate areas for purposes of election districts. In that case, the Court reaffirmed that “communities within the Municipality of Anchorage are socio-economically integrated as a matter of law,” and that the community of Eagle River could be paired in a house district with the South Anchorage hillside.8 This Eagle River-South Anchorage hillside district was “not unconstitutional in any respect.”9"

Then, in the footnote 8, Singer tells us:

"Id. at 1091 (upholding House District 32, which spanned from the Eagle River Valley to the Anchorage hillside); See ARB Board Record at 10414 (2002 Amended Redistricting

Plan)."

Again, I say that the 2002 House District 32 was very different from 2022 Senate District F.

In those days, Eagle River and Chugiak weren't big enough for two House districts.  The north of the Eagle River Valley district had to go to southern Mat-Su to get enough population for a second district.  

In fact House District 30 captured most of the Eagle River Valley area.  House District 32 (the one Singer keeps harking back to) stretches from the edges of District 30 down south to Whittier and into the Kenai Peninsula, getting enough population to be a whole district by taking some population from the Hillside. 

BUT based on the only 2002 House maps I could locate, there are few if any residents of Eagle River in that district. If there are Eagle River residents, they are the leftovers once the district hit its target number of inhabitants. HD32 was called the Chugach State Park district.  This was a compromise district that went to the Supreme Court and was accepted because of problems with deviations in other districts.  It was a compromise under special circumstances.

From  the Alaska Election Pamphlet 2002 Anchorage area  here are the maps so you can see the context of that district.  

Maps of 

D 17 (ER) 18 (Military) =Senate I

D15 (Rural Mat-Su)  D16 (Chugiak/Southern Mat-Su= Sen H

D32 (Huffman/Ocean View) D32 (Chugach State Park) =Sen P

This first map focuses on the Chugiak/Southern Mat-Su district 16.  You can see a tiny District 17 on the lower left.  That's Eagle River.

You can see here that Eagle River, HD 17 was relatively tiny.  Smaller than the largest districts in the Anchorage bowl.  It was paired with the Base (18) to make a Senate district because there weren't enough people for two Eagle River/Chugiak House districts.  32 goes down into the Kenai Peninsula.

In the map below you can see District 17 better.  Basically ER Valley is in one district.  What ER residents there might be in District 32 are surplus people who couldn't be fit into 17.  

This wasn't an "Eagle River/Hillside" district as Singer portrays it.  It was called the Chugach State Park district that reached to the outer edges of ER and down into the Kenai.  It was a district that was trying to scrape up enough population to be an actual district.  

It's sort of like how the Board majority characterizes HD 23 as the JBER district when it's really 1/3 north Anchorage Bowl.  

I haven't been able to find better maps to pin this down more precisely.  But it seems a point worth raising and exploring. I suspect the meme of an Eagle River/Hillside house district in 2002 that was constitutionally approved that floated around among the Option 3B supporters wasn't better supported than my points here.

Political-Gerrymandering And Zero-Sum Thinking

There are a number of issues to raise from the Board's motion to the Supreme Court and I just don't have the time to go through them all right now.  But I do want to address this one. From Singer:  

The upshot of the superior court’s order is that because it found a portion of the

Board’s previous 2021 Redistricting Plan invalid as a political gerrymander, the

Board’s new April 2022 Amended Redistricting Plan must also be a gerrymander.  On this basis, the superior court orders the Board to adopt senate pairings advanced by and preferred by democratic leadership in the Alaska Senate.6 This is wholly inappropriate.

First, the judge didn't conclude that because there was political gerrymandering in the first plan that, ipso facto, the second plan is also gerrymandered.  Judge Matthews addressed this question directly and at length.  He concluded that given the intentional partisan gerrymandering the first time round, and given that the second time round the Board continued to create two Senate seats for Eagle River, the level of proof of partisan gerrymandering  needed wasn't as high as it was the first time.  The judge also cited an email from board member Simpson 

 "to an unknown number of contacts stating in part that the Court's Order "implies that what the court perceived as a political gerrymander must be replaced with a different political gerrymander more to their liking."118 (From Court Order p. 24)

While I suspect that Simpson was probably being sarcastic, he's an experienced attorney and should know better than to write such an incriminating sentence.  Sarcastic or not, I suspect it was revealing of what he was thinking.  

Second,  

"On this basis, the superior court orders the Board to adopt senate pairings advanced by and preferred by democratic leadership in the Alaska Senate.6"

Let's see now.  Option 2 was advanced by the East Anchorage plaintiffs, not the Democratic leadership.  I'd note that Option 3B WAS drawn and advanced by one of the most partisan Republican operatives, and former Chair of the Republican Party. And supported by the three Republican appointed Board members.  

I'd note that footnote 6 refers to "Senate Minority Leader Tom Begich’s text-message communications to a board member seeking to influence Anchorage senate pairings."

It seems the Board majority and its attorney are firm believers of the zero-sum way of thinking.  It posits that what one person loses, the other person gains.  

Here, Singer posits that if the judge takes away the ill gained extra Republican Senate seat that the majority 'won.' then that translates into an intentional  extra Democratic seat for the enemy.  Singer seems to assume here that the only reason the Board minority voted for Option 2 was to gain an extra Democratic seat.  His evidence is a text message from Tom Begich, which he doesn't quote. This attempt by Singer to simply turn around and accuse the Board minority of doing what the Board majority did is classic Republican Rovian  "Tactic #3: Accuse Your Opponent of What He/She is Going to Accuse You Of."   At times it might be accurate, but the evidence against the Board majority is overwhelming while the evidence against the Board minority doesn't exist.  Was there lobbying of the Board minority?  Sure, but it was for specific things various constituents wanted, things other than partisan gerrymandering.  It wasn't to get more people elected from a particular party as the actions of the Board majority are.  

OK, enough for tonight, but there is plenty more there to chew on and spit out.  

Expect Fireworks At Thursday's Redistricting Court Hearing

 While I've been out enjoying Alaska the last couple of days - down at Captain Cook State Park - Matt Buxton has been going through the Girdwood Plaintiffs' briefs.  [I haven't been able to get much from the Court's Most Requested Cases page - the updates are keeping up with what's coming in.  I can see the documents on the cases docket page, but I can't open those.  So I decided to just get out into nature for a couple of days before Thursday's hearing.  

I was out walking on the beach this morning, taking in the car sized boulders scattered all along the beach and into the water.  

Meanwhile, Matt's been quoting from the Girdwood plaintiffs' filings.  

As I wrote May 1, it would be hard to come up with any other conclusion that the Board majority has again  ignored what makes sense to carve out one more Republican Senate seat.  I've been watching the Board since December 2020.  There's no other reasonable explanation.  

The Court had remanded the map to the Board to make corrections.  The corrected one Senate districted, but insisted on leaving the other gerrymandered district.  

The judge let a self-imposed deadline to decide if the remanded map was ok slip [like the student who has the repeated nightmare that he missed a final exam, I too wonder if that was somehow resolved and I missed it], and then set a schedule for a somewhat different hearing - appeals of the final redistricting plan.  I know this is confusing.  Let's try again.

The judge remanded the case to the Board.  Then he had to decide whether to accept the remand.  To my knowledge, he hasn't done that, though he'd set a date to do it by.  That date passed.  

But there was also the opportunity for anyone to appeal the Board's second plan.  

Yes, these seem like the same thing.  The difference is, as I understand it, that the judge, by himself, can accept or reject the remand.  If he accepted it, then people could appeal that decision within 30 days of the decisions.  But the judge's ruling shortened the 30 day period and didn't offer his decision on the remand.  

So I speculated, in this April 30, 2022 post 

"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." (emphasis added)

 And Matt's Twitter thread today, goes through the Girdwood Plaintiffs' submission which goes through those emails and offers a number of examples of communications between the Board majority and others which give more evidence of the Board majority's working with partisan Republicans to achieve their aim.  There's board member Marcum's joining a private national Republican group whose explicit goal is to make sure that redistricting around the country favors Republicans.  (But, again, I pointed out that she's the CEO of an organization with the same goals back in May 2021.)

There are emails that call Board members Bahnke and Borromeo "bitches of the highest order"and Matt himself is called a POS.  

But the real meat for the judge (and the Supreme Court justices after that) are the communications that show links that clearly show their partisan intent and also one from Simpson that shows he and Binkley really didn't understand much of the geography of Eagle River and Chugiak and the Hillside, even though there was plenty of public testimony explaining it to them.  It's pretty persuasive that they had an outcome in mind (preserving the Senate seat made up fo HD 24 (Chugiak) and HD 23 (JBER/Govt Hill/Mountain View).  

So go read Matt's Twitter thread.  (My understanding is that you can read Twitter without being a member.)  

Court is at 10am tomorrow morning.  You can listen in at:

https://public.courts.alaska.gov/app/acs/stream/

Close to or shortly after, Judge Thomas Matthews name should show up below "Judge".  (There may be other judges listed as well.)  This is NOT a user friendly set up, but I suspect the Court thinks it's more secure than the Youtube channel they were using.

 

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.  

Redistricting: Will The Supreme Court Reject Alaska's Proclamation Because Of Partisan Gerrymandering?

[NOTE:  I'm going to discuss the law in parts of this post.  I'm not an attorney. But I do know that the law is more complicated than it seems.  That you can find a statute in one place, but that there may be exceptions to that law written in other laws.  So, take what I say about the law skeptically.  Take everything I say skeptically.]

IS GERRYMANDERING A VALID LEGAL REASON TO REJECT THE PROCLAMATION PLAN?

When I blogged the 2010 Redistricting Board (you can see the index of that here), the Board's attorney, Michael White, once told me that no redistricting plan had ever been rejected because of partisan gerrymandering.  I'm not sure if he meant just in Alaska or nationally, but I think at the time both were true.  Since that time the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned that state's map in 2018 based on political gerrymandering.

"The Court also adopted and announced a new legal standard for determining whether a map is unconstitutional. According to the opinion, “neutral criteria of compactness, contiguity, minimization of the division of political subdivisions, and maintenance of population equality among congressional districts…provide a ‘floor’ of protection for an individual against the dilution of his or her vote in the creation of such districts.” The Court went on to state that when 'these neutral criteria have been subordinated, in whole or in part, to considerations such as gerrymandering for unfair partisan political advantage, a congressional redistricting plan violates [the Free and Equal Elections Clause] of the Pennsylvania Constitution.'”

I've noted on this blog a couple of times how it was clear that some of those testifying were simply using criteria like compactness and deviation as a cover for what appeared to be more political mapping.  This became clear because people used one criterion in one situation then ignored it to emphasize a different criterion in another situation.  Marcum, for example, early on strongly advocated the idea that every district in Anchorage had been ruled Socio-Economically Integrated (SEI) with every other district in Anchorage.  But when she proposed a map that joined Eagle River with Muldoon and JBER, she argued heavily for the SEI of all the military and retired military in those three places.  

All this is preface to this post.  Those people thinking that the obvious political gerrymandering of Eagle River and Goldstream should be a slam dunk in the Alaska Supreme Court. . . well, no.  

I can't find any language in the Alaska Constitution that bars political gerrymandering.  The US Supreme Court will consider racial gerrymandering, but has rejected political gerrymandering.

"Held: Partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts. Pp. 6–34."

But in this post I'm going to offer a possible way to get politics considered in Alaska's redistricting appeals.

You can read the Alaska Constitution on redistricting here.  It's not long.  But there aren't very many rules about what the Board CANNOT do.  Mostly how they make the House districts and that's basically focused on balancing the ideas of compactness, contiguity, and socio-economic integration.   Federal requirements add being as close to one-person-one vote as possible.  The federal Voting Rights Act has other standards, mostly related to not discriminating based on race.  But the US Supreme Court has invalidated one of the key aspects of the VRA and there's no telling what they will still recognize as valid.  That's why the Democrats' new Voting Rights bills are so important.  

POLITICS IS MENTIONED ONCE WITH REGARD TO REDISTRICTING IN THE ALASKA CONSTITUTION

The closest the Alaska Constitution comes to banning partisanship is this sentence: 

 "Appointments shall be made without regard to political affiliation."

What exactly does that mean?  If you make a decision 'without regard' then you could choose a Democrat or a Republican or an Independent or a Green, whatever, so long as . . . what?  You weren't aware of that affiliation?  You didn't take that into consideration?  

HOW CAN WE KNOW IF DUNLEAVY CONSIDERED POLITICAL AFFILIATION?

How do you even know if someone made their appointment with or without regard to political affiliation?  To my knowledge, no one has ever raised this question in a challenge to a redistricting plan.  Actually, the original Alaska Constitution gave redistricting to the governor to take care of.  A 1998 Constitutional Amendment created our current system (pp. 114-115) From what I can tell, in 2000 Gov. Knowles appointed Democrats.  Gov. Parnell chose Republicans in 2010 and Gov. Dunleavy chose Republicans in 2020. The only appointments that have been seemingly free of political consideration have been the made by the Alaska Supreme Court Chief Justices.  But I say 'seemingly" because as judges, they don't officially affiliate with a political party.  

The Speaker of the House (Rep. Bryce Edgemon)  who appointed Nicole Borromeo was officially an Independent.  I don't know Borromeo's affiliation and it hasn't been clear from her actions on the Board.  (Republicans might say that her opposition to the Republican proposals at the end show she was a Democrat, but simply opposing Republicans doesn't make you a Democrat.  Especially when GOP actions appear to be openly pushing political advantage.)  Melanie Bahnke was appointed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Joel Bolger.  (He retired in June 2021, so if this Proclamation is challenged, he won't be sitting in judgment.)  Again, I don't know Bahnke's political affiliation.  It's not mentioned in any of the descriptions or bios I could find online about her or Borromeo.  If they are registered to a Party, it's not that important an aspect of who they are.

On the other hand, Governor Dunleavy appears much more likely to have considered political affiliation: 

1.  Budd Simpson is the husband of Paulette Simpson who has been active in the Juneau and Alaska GOP as an officer, was  State Convention Organizing Chair in 2020.  In 2013 she was described as a powerful party activist who was 'fired' from her position along other Alaska Republican heavyweights like Glenn Clary during an internal party takeover that was short lived.  In 2016 she was named State Republican Party State Finance Chair by Tuckerman Babcock when Randy Ruedrich stepped down as State Party chair.  Paulette doesn't show up on the current Alaska GOP list of officers, but she donates significantly to the party still.  But, you say, Dunleavy appointed Budd, not Paulette.  Good point.  There are married couples with spouses of different parties. But it's not that common.  And Budd Simpson did split another $500 in contributions to Dan Sullivan and Don Young in 2020.  So he does have some skin in the GOP game too.  

2.  Bethany Marcum is the Executive Director of the Koch backed Libertarian oriented Alaska Policy Forum. The Forum's mission and goals are to cut back government as much as they can.  Exactly what Governor Dunleavy wants to do.  The best way to do that in Alaska would be to elect the most conservative Republicans they can find.  What better position for Marcum than to be on the Redistricting Board where she can influence who gets elected to the Alaska legislature for the next ten years?  Did I mention she was on Dunleavy's staff when he was a Senator?  Here's a bio of Marcum attached to an essay at Constituting America:

"Bethany Marcum has made Alaska her home for over 20 years. She currently works as Executive Director of the Alaska Policy Forum. She also serves as a citizen airman in the Alaska Air National Guard. She worked as legislative staff for State Senator Mike Dunleavy from 2013 to 2017. She is currently the Alaska Republican Party Region V Representative and has held a variety of other positions at the district and state level. She is a former president, long-time board member and life member of the Alaska Chapter of Safari Club International and is a life member of the NRA. She serves in her church with the children’s ministry and is a volunteer “big” with Big Brother Big Sisters of Alaska. She and her husband Conley enjoy hunting together." [this was undated]

3.  The third Republican on the Board is former state senator and representative John Binkley.  He was appointed by then Senate President Cathy Giessel.  I had thought he'd be more independent because Giessel had become a moderate Republican (or rather she stayed the same but by comparison to the governor seemed moderate).  Her district had been stretched from the Anchorage hillside to Nikiski in the last redistricting.  She hadn't appreciated that.  National Republicans helped Dunleavy purge the state House of moderate Republicans in 2020 and also had her term shortened to two years twice.  In the last election she lost her primary (as did John Coghill) to further-to-the-right Republicans.  So one could hold out some hope that Binkley wasn't so tightly bound to Dunleavy.  But then Binkley chaired the campaign against Dunleavy's recall.  So there was also loyalty to Dunleavy on his part.   

Both Dunleavy selections would appear to have been made with consideration of 'political affiliation.'  These weren't just folks who happened to be registered as Republicans. In the case of Marcum it's someone he's worked closely with, whose day job is to reach goals (no taxes, shrinking government) that would be easier to reach if conservative Republicans control the legislature.  

Budd Simpson isn't quite as ideologically ideal, but he does have close ties to the Republican Party.  He's more than just a random Republican registered voter. One could counter that Dunleavy only knows Republicans, or only trusts them, but that's a failing on his part.  The governor should serve all Alaskans, not just the Republicans. He should have good relationships with honest, well-intended people who aren't Republicans.  I'm sure folks in Juneau can fill in more on Simpson's background.  

CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE

But how does one prove intent? We have to gather circumstantial evidence.  Again, I'm not a lawyer, so I have to look up a lot of definitions of circumstantial evidence to make sure that they all pretty much say the same thing. This comes from a New York Courts website.  What I first got was a document about circumstantial evidence, but there was no identification on the document itself.  By playing with the url, I was able to find this page which links to the document.  It's sort of a catalogue of jury instructions that New York judges can use.  You can scroll down to circumstantial evidence, or just go directly to it here.

"Circumstantial evidence is direct evidence of a fact from which a person may reasonably infer the existence or non- existence of another fact. A person's guilt of a charged crime may be proven by circumstantial evidence, if that evidence, while not directly establishing guilt, gives rise to an inference of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.3"

There's a lot more at the link, but the take-away is that circumstantial can be used to show what wasn't, or cannot be, observed directly.  Like Dunleavy's intent when selection appointees to the Alaska Redistricting Board.

CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE OF PARTISANSHIP

1.   DUNLEAVY STRONGLY FAVORS HIS APPOINTMENTS TO BE LOYAL TO HIM AND TO HIS GOALS

When Dunleavy first came to office his chief of staff, Tuckerman Babcock, required 1,200 non-politically appointed state employees to sign loyalty oaths or be fired.   That was in 2019. In 2021 a Federal judge rule that illegal and that the governor could be personally liable.  

"The decision by Senior U.S. District Judge John Sedwick Friday is a major defeat for Dunleavy and Babcock, who could be personally liable for their actions.  The judge refused to go along with the claim of “qualified immunity” because Dunleavy and Babcock should have known they were violating the rights of employees."

Why is this relevant here?

1. The original loyalty oath business suggests that Dunleavy does not like having employees who he doesn't know are loyal to him and his program.  While that's true of most elected officials, this is extreme.  Most assume that professionals will do their job professionally.
2. The governor was willing to try to do something that the judge said he should have known was wrong. 
3. If Dunleavy was willing to try to impose a loyalty test on state employees despite that being clearly illegal, it's reasonable to believe that choosing highly partisan Board members, despite the constitution prohibiting selection based on political affiliation, would come naturally to the governor.
4. Tuckerman Babcock is extremely partisan and was the chair of the Alaska Republican Party from 2016-2018.  He resigned as chair the same day Governor elect  Dunleavy appointed him chief of staff/.  He's also been involved heavily in redistricting.  He even wrote a book chapter on redistricting.
5. It's not a stretch to assume that Dunleavy chose Marcum and Simpson precisely because they were Republican loyalists who would carry out his political wishes.  

OK, up to this point we have 

1. the highly partisan nature of the Marcum pick, and
2. the less glaring but still partisan choice of Simpson, and
3. Dunleavy's attempt to get state employees to sign loyalty oaths, which supports the idea that he's hardly likely to select someone who won't do his bidding.  

2.  BUT WHAT DID DUNLEAVY WANT?  A SUPPORTIVE LEGISLATURE

Although Republicans make up a majority of both the state House and Senate, the Republicans are not all united with Dunleavy.  Some House Republicans have joined a coalition with Democrats.  The Senate Republicans are divided as well and block or alter Dunleavy's proposals.  

What the Governor wants is a Republican majority in both houses that is loyal to the Governor and passes his budget, PFD proposals, and other initiatives.  Not only does he want to weaken Democrats, but he's frustrated with Republicans who don't support him on everything.  The state GOP successfully eliminated two long time Senators,  conservative Republican senators with even more conservative, Dunleavy-loyal Republicans in the primary.  They did the same to less than 'loyal' Republicans in the House..

What better opportunity to advance loyal Republicans and weaken Democrats than to have loyal supporters work toward that end on the Redistricting Board?  

WHAT DID HIS APPOINTEES DELIVER FOR DUNLEAVY? 

A.  In the first round of map making, Bethany Marcum made Anchorage maps that paired a number of Democrats into the same house districts.  Meanwhile Simpson managed a protrusion that slipped one Democratic representative into the district of another.  While he has protested it was accidental, no one has explained how he did it accidentally except to talk about the oddities of Census blocks in general.  And it managed to get repaired without doing harm to the Census blocks. It appeared that they got assistance in developing those maps, because the Boards' official software purposely did not contain any political data.  After the strong protests against the political nature of the Board's v1 map, I suggested in public testimony, that Board members should publicly report any contact outside the Board - besides public testimony - they had to help with mapping.  Later, both Borromeo and Bahnke stated publicly at Board meetings that they'd had no outside contact.  None of the GOP-appointed Board members made such statements.  

B.  After the public hearing tour, Bethany Marcum made a map of Anchorage that had house districts that included Muldoon and Eagle River and other pairings that the public testimony had strongly opposed.  Districts that would add strong Republican populations that would dilute the Democratic East Anchorage voters.  Even Budd Simpson voted no, saying the public testimony had swayed him.  The Eagle River House districts stayed in Eagle River by a 3-2 vote.  Only Binkley joined Marcum to support her map.

C.  Senate Pairings.  At what seemed like the very last minute - Board member Bahnke said she was taken by complete surprise - Board member Bethany Marcum presented a map of Anchorage senate pairings which linked the two Eagle River house districts, NOT with each other, but one with South Muldoon (about 10 miles away by road through one or two other districts) and the other with JBER, Government Hill, and parts of downtown Anchorage.  This was after all the testimony opposed to such linkings.  An alternative map was rejected 3-2.  Marcum's map was passed 3-2.  There was minimal debate.  

Although Simpson had opposed those connections in the House districts, he voted, with little or no comment in favor of Marcum's map.  Others have spoken at length about how this gives ER two Senate seats and is an example of cracking much more diverse districts and favors GOP candidates. 

If the GOP-appointed members had had a good non-partisan, non- gerrymandering reason for these Senate pairings, they didn't tell anyone.  They did emphasize how important military socio-economic links tied these areas together.  I've pointed out in this Nov 9 post that the military are among the most favored subgroups already in Alaska, with 20% of the Senators fitting in that category.  I'd also note that Marcum had previously argued strongly that social-economic integration was irrelevant when pairing other Anchorage House seats because the Courts had ruled every neighborhood in Anchorage was socially-economically integrated with every other district.  Now SEI was her only argument for the Eagle River pairings.  

After this was over I asked Budd Simpson, 

Me:  "Since you cited the public testimony for keeping Eagle River separate from Muldoon when you voted for the House districts (he voted, to everyone's surprise, against the Marcum plan), what changed that caused you to vote for pairing ER with Muldoon in the Senate pairings?"

Simpson:  "I don't talk to bloggers."

Me:  explaining more of my background and redistricting blogging history and asking again

Simpson:  "You can ask all you want, I'm not going to answer."

This only makes sense if he doesn't have a good reason.  He's an attorney.  He should be good at articulating his argument.  My guess is that after his unexpected vote on the Anchorage House map, he'd been taken to the woodshed by his wife, the governor, and other GOP officials and was reminded why he was appointed to this Board.  Sure, this is speculation, but I haven't heard any better explanations.  I would say that his silence forces others to fill in the void.  

D.  Allocation of Senate Terms To Alternating Cycles

I wrote about this in detail here.  Basically, after a fairly brief discussion, and after rejecting the option of flipping a coin to decide whether to start with seat A or seat T, the GOP-appointed Board members all voted for Bethany Marcum's Allocation plan with the other two Board members opposed.  Why wouldn't the three flip a coin, as Nicole Borromeo proposed,  "to avoid any appearance of partisanship?"  Because, the outcome was punishment for moderate Republican Senators and reward for those loyal to Governor Dunleavy. Something they didn't want to say out loud.  The chart is pretty clear in the outcome.  In the follow-up post, I showed that the motion itself was hardly a plan.  Marcum once stated her 'motion' as   "I propose we go in simple numerical logical order, starting with A 2 years 4 years 2 years cycle like that.??  Is that how we say it Peter? 2 years 4 years 2022, 2024?"  The second time it wasn't even a complete sentence: "2022, 2024, 2026 something like that" in violation of all standards for making official motions. This wasn't a high school government motion on the theme of the prom.  This would affect the Alaska legislature for ten years.   It would appear Board members didn't even know the details of what the motion would do.  But that is grounds for a different challenge to the motion.  The point here, is that Dunleavy's appointees carried out exactly what he wanted them to do:  Support those Republicans in the Senate who stayed loyal to him and punish those who didn't go along with all his proposals.  

I mention it here only because it strongly supports the idea that the plan came from others, and because it so carefully and so successfully targeted seats for punishment or no punishment, that someone like Randy Ruedrich or Tuckerman Babcock with years of redistricting experience likely would have been involved.  And that these are examples that taken all together show a pattern of partisan appointees doing what they were appointed to do.  

SUMMARY

1.  The Alaska Constitution says that people should be appointed to the Alaska Redistricting Board "without regard to political affiliation."

2.  Governor Dunleavy's appointees were not simply Republicans.  One had been active as an officer in the party and was the executive director of an organization whose job is to pass anti-government legislation.  The other is the husband of a woman very active in the Alaska Republican Party, and, Budd Simpson himself  had contributed $500 to GOP candidates in 2020, the year he was appointed.    His wife contributed over $1000 to the Party that year.  This is the Party that has already supported the far-right, Trump supported US Senate candidate over our sitting Republican US Senator Lisa Murkowski. 

3.  It is hard to imagine Gov. Dunleavy would have made his appointments "without regard to political affiliation."  Why?  Because this is the governor who on taking office sent letters to 1200 career employees requiring them to sign letters pledging loyalty to his policies or be fired.  Since then the judge has found this not only illegal, but so illegal that he may hold the governor personally liable.  That's not the kind of man who would choose people for a Board that will help determine the political makeup of the Alaska legislature for the next ten years, without considering their political affiliation and loyalty to his policies.  

4.  In various actions - early Anchorage maps, later Anchorage maps, Senate pairings, and Allocation of Senate Terms - his two appointees made decisions that harmed Democrats and 'disloyal Republicans' and favored Republicans who had been loyal to the Governor. Only once did Simpson vote contrary to Dunleavy's wishes, but he quickly toed the line after that.  

5.  Not one of these points by itself is overwhelming proof, but taken altogether, they show a pattern of partisanship starting with the appointments and ending with various actions aimed at weakening Democrats and moderate Republicans.  

CONCLUSIONS

Dunleavy appointed two Board members who delivered on his objectives - to make maps and allocate the Senate seats in a way that would favor candidates  more supportive of the governor's policies.  

From what I can tell, every governor, since the constitution was amended to create a Redistricting Board up to now, has appointed people of their own party.

The requirement to NOT consider political affiliation when choosing is clearly not being followed.  I suspect the Supreme Court has not ruled on this because no one has specifically brought it up in suits against redistricting plans.  However, given the clear line from Dunleavy's appointments to specific partisan outcomes, it's apparent to me that his appointments not only considered political affiliation, but also commitment to fulfill the Governor's interests in redistricting.  

If any of the possible lawsuits against this year's Proclamation raises this point and the evidence I've presented here and if the Court fails to act on it, then the Court would be effectively saying that the clause that prohibits considering political affiliation when selecting Board members is meaningless or unenforceable.  

What might the court do?  I suspect that depends on what the attorneys ask of the court.  Here are two options.

1. At one extreme, the Court could invalidate Dunleavy's choices and order him to choose two new members.  This would not only be very disruptive to the redistricting process, but the Governor could simply pick two more Republicans and then what?
2. The Court could instead invalidate the most partisan results of the Proclamation Plan and order the Board to make appropriate changes.  This would include at least the Eagle River Senate pairings and the Allocation of Senate Terms.  This would neutralize the partisanship of the original appointments without dismantling all the other work that was done by the Board.  And it would send a message to future governors (and Senate Presidents, Speakers of the House, and even Supreme Court Chief Justices) that if they make partisan choices that result in partisan gerrymandering of the new redistricting plan, those parts of the plan will be invalidated.  It might not change what governors do, but it would set a precedent that the Courts will reverse partisan plans.  And they can do this because the Constitution requires that Board picks be made without regard to political affiliation.  Which implies the Board is not supposed to make politically partisan plans.  

FINAL NOTE:  I've focused on the Eagle River Senate pairings because they seem the most egregious acts of partisanship and because I know the Anchorage area much better than I know the rest of the state.  I know that the residents of Goldstream strongly protested first their being carved out of Fairbanks and into a much larger district, and then their Senate pairing.  But most of that seems to have been done by John Binkley, not a Dunleavy appointee.  Other areas of the state may also have grievances that I'm less sensitive to.  I apologize.  Just focusing on the Anchorage area was a huge task.  Others can make their own cases better than I can.  

AK Redistricting Board GOP Members Use Allocation To Punish Moderate Republicans

I've been slogging through the Nov. 9 video of the Board's truncation discussion and the Senate seat cycle allocation battle.  I'll get up a discussion of what happened later.   In this post I want to look at why the GOP-appointed members of the Board gave up all pretense of comity and just used their 3-2 majority to bulldoze their plan through.  I'm sure they felt upset by the previous attacks on the Senate pairings - but the attacks were well earned.  But there's been enough attention there.  So let's look at what they were fighting for.  

[I've put some background information down at the bottom for anyone who needs boning up on truncation and allocation of election years.  Look for the big bolded heading at the bottom of the post.]

At the time the allocation battle was fought on November 9, I wondered why this was so important.  I thought perhaps they were trying to make it more difficult for Democrats.  Forcing them into another election costs them time, money, and there's always the chance they could lose. But after reviewing who all got forced into an extra election via the election year allocation process,  for the most part they used it to punish those Republican senators who did not support Dunleavy, but worked with Democrats on many issues.  

Bethany Marcum, one of Dunleavy's picks for the Board, insisted on starting with Seat A and alternating through the alphabet of Senate seats assigning 2 year and 4 year terms. The members who were appointed by Independents suggested flipping a coin to determine if they started with Seat A or Seat T to avoid any appearance of partisanship.  When they asked the majority bloc of Republican appointees what their problem was with flipping a coin, they got answers that changed the subject or no answer at all.  The GOP members were not going to take a chance.  They clearly had an assignment to deliver and that's what they did.  

What was their goal?  To punish moderate Republicans and those who even only sometimes went against Dunleavy's wishes.  [I checked with a very politically savvy Alaskan who helped me divide the Republicans into these groups.]  The punishment is they have shortened terms (from four years to two years) to get back on the cycle of ten senators one election year and ten the next.) And thus they have an extra election they have to run in.  So, in the charts below: 

• Blue is Democrats.  
• Brownish is Moderate Republicans
• Pinkish is Republicans who sometimes work with Democrats
• Red is Dunleavy loyal Republicans

• Column 1 are the names of Senators.  
• Column 2 shows which ones have to run for an extra election based on allocation of seat rotation cycle.  (Some have an extra election because of truncation but that's not on here because it's not the result of allocation to a rotation cycle.)
• Column 3 shows the number of extra elections per senator and per group if the rotation had been switched. (Either starting with Senate seat T, or starting with 4 instead of 2.)

For Democrats it's kind of a wash.  Four extra elections either way, though all but Kawasaki are in relatively safe districts.  

But look at what happened to the Moderate Republicans.  All of them were forced into an extra election by the 3-2 allocation decision of the Board.  And von Imhoff?  Her seat was divided into three Senate seats and she's only listed as a footnote on the Board's chart.  Based on a Google search of her address, she would be in Mia Costello's district which is 88.3% the old Costello district.  

If the rotation had been reversed, none of the Moderate Republicans would have an extra election. 

Now let's look at the less moderate, but not totally loyal to the Governor, Republicans in pink.  The two were forced to each have an extra election because of the rotation.  If the rotation were reversed, neither would have had an extra election due to rotation. Wilson has two extra elections because he was due to run again in 2024, but because of truncation, he has to run in 2022 (a two year term) and again in 2024 (another two year term.) 

And finally those Republicans who are good Dunleavy loyalists.  Only one out of six has to run an extra election.  If it were switched, 5 out of six would have had to run.  

So, the impact on Republican Senators was the reason the GOP-appointed Board members were not even going to discuss why they were so hell bent on doing it their way and rammed this through over the objections of the two Independent appointed Board members.  

But, you might ask, if they rotated one seat this way and the other seat that way, how could it turn out so lopsided?  

1. First, there are 13 Republicans and only seven Democrats in the Senate, so more Republicans are going to be affected anyway.
2. By carefully numbering the House seats and carefully pairing them you can work out an order that alternates the Moderate Republicans. It's a bit tricky and you have to be thinking ahead.
3. Randy Ruedrich, the former Republican Party chair, has been heavily involved with redistricting since at least the 2000 process.  He has all the districts and all the incumbents in his head.  He is walking with a cane now and moves slower, but I saw no signs that his brain wasn't at full capacity.  And the Board didn't approve the final Senate pairings until the morning of November 9, the same day that truncation and allocation took place.  Marcum's map of the rejiggered Anchorage Senate pairings didn't show up until that morning.  They worked very carefully on those that night.  Board member Bahnke said that day, "I was taken totally by surprise."

They weren't able to make it work out perfectly, but they get every one of the Moderate Republicans and even the sometimes Moderate Republicans to run an extra election and all but one of the loyal Dunleavy Republicans got a free pass on the extra election from allocation.  (A few got an extra election through truncation.)

I'm guessing that Randy Ruedrich doesn't even care anymore about this intra-party squabble.  For him, I think this just a chess game.  It's a test of whether he can pull it off.  He's got a lot of knowledge due to his participation in this process over the years, and he's very smart.  And he likes to win.  He's played on the Oil Companies' team for so long it's just habit now. Or so I'm guessing.

How the House districts got configured and numbered didn't happen in public. Nor did the final Anchorage Senate pairings that showed up on that Tuesday morning and were quickly voted on with no discussion. In a future post I will go through the allocation process really carefully to show that:

1. It was really sloppy
1. If each of the Board members would have been asked to privately write down the motion that was passed, they would all be different
2. And if asked how it would be carried out, those would be all different too.
2. The GOP appointed members essentially stonewalled the Independent appointed members 
3. The GOP group had a prearranged plan (with Ruedrich's fingerprints on it) and they were not going to break ranks.  I'm pretty sure there was a lot of behind the scenes pressure on them to vote "the right way."  Especially after Budd Simpson broke ranks on the House districts previously.  I'd note that when I tried to ask him questions when it was over, he flatly refused to answer any questions. He said, "I don't talk to bloggers."

Here's the Board's chart post allocation that was created on November 9, 2021 after the allocation decisions were made.  It's taken me a long time to figure out the last two columns and how the staff figured out what to do.  And I think there's an error or two in the last column.  But that's for the post on the process that resulted in the chart. 

Do the extra elections matter?  It's not really clear.  But in the last election, two long standing Republican Senators lost their seats in the primaries to more conservative Republicans.  One was the Senate president who worked with the Democrats and the other was long time conservative Sen Coghill from the Fairbanks area.  These moderate Republicans are blocking Dunleavy from getting all he wants and the Republican party is set on getting rid of them.  

With closed primaries ended, it may be harder to bump off these Moderate Republicans and replace them with Republicans more loyal to Dunleavy.  The top four candidates of all parties now will run against each other in the ranked choice general election.  And Dunleavy himself is on the ballot.  So time will tell.  

In the meanwhile the allocation of Senate terms to one cycle or the next  was just as partisan and just as forced as the Eagle River pairings, but the outcome was less visible.  I hope I've made it more visible here.  

BACKGROUND   (I said this be down here at the end for those who need it)

There are three basic functions for the Board, regarding the Senate seats:

1. Pairing house seats into Senate seats.  There are 40 house seats.  Two house seats have to be paired to make a Senate seat.  The key criterion is that they are contiguous.  Compactness is another feature.  But how you pair seats can also affect the next election.  
1. In this round there's been a lot of justifiable fuss over the pairing of the two Eagle River seats, not with each other, but with Government Hill in one case and with South Muldoon in another.  Goldstream folks in Fairbanks were first upset that they weren't in a House district with nearby areas such as Ester and the University.  And in Anchorage Senator von Imhoff's Senate seat was so dismembered that on the Board's charts her name is left off (except for a footnote saying her seat was now in three different Senate seats) that only Mia Costello's name is listed for her Senate seat. (I think she's in Seat K based on an address on 100th Ave that Google provided.) 
2. Also, how the House seats are numbered affects the letters of the Senate seats. So House districts 1 and 2 are in Southeast Alaska and combine into Senate Seat A.  The order of the Senate seats matters when it comes to allocation of seats to the Senate election cycle - see below.
2. Truncation - once the seats are paired, they get truncated.  That is, those seats with a significant number of new voters have to run again in the very next election. This is based on the notion that people shouldn't be represented by people they didn't have a chance to vote for. This year they made the cutoff at 16.3% new voters (or less than 83.7% old voters) in a Senate seat.  The debate on this was polite and seemingly non-partisan.  (I say seemingly because there's always a chance I missed something.)  There are 20 Senate seats with four year terms and the Alaska constitution requires ten run at one election cycle and the others run at the next one.  So ten of the Senators would be running in 2022 anyway.  Only ten Senate seats were possibly subject to truncation.  Six of them had terms that were up in 2024 and were forced to run again in 2022.
3. Allocation of election year rotation. Finally, the Board has to make sure that ten Senators will run in one election year and the other ten in the next election year.  This is the part I'm focusing on here.  How they did it will come later, but here I'm going to show the outcome and why the GOP appointed members refused to budge.