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.  

Bill Allen - My Respect For Him As A Pre-Modern Man In A Modern World

When I heard last week that Bill Allen had died, I immediately wanted to write a bit of a remembrance.  I sat through three different political corruption trials in 2007 and 2008 where he was a key witness for the prosecution.  He had already pleaded guilty and would explain each time how he had given money to different Alaskan GOP politicians so they would vote favorably for the oil industry, for his company VECO in particular.

I thought I had a post that spoke to the part I wanted to say.  But I couldn't find it.  

I just read Michael Carey's Anchorage Daily News opinion piece remembering Bill Allen, so I'll refer you to that.  I met Michael on the first or second day of the first of the trials.  He'd heard that the defendant had been a former student of mine and invited me to lunch.  I told him I couldn't talk about what I knew about Tom from my teacher-student relationship, but he still took me to lunch that day.  Michael's a good man and I appreciate his view on things.

Michael's article got me to look again back into the archives of this blog and I found what I was looking for.  It's in a post talking about the stories imbedded in the trail, in this case, cultural stories. I'd note my use of the term "pre-modern man."  This doesn't mean cave man.  It refers to the value systems prior to the Scientific Revolution and the application of science and rationality to agriculture, the production of goods, to medicine, and to government and law.  It was a time when family and power were the key things that mattered. 

From Pete Kott's Trial: The Underlying Stories September 15, 2007

"First, I would note that the main character in the trial so far has been Bill Allen. Pete Kott has said very little since the first day when the jury pool assembled and Kott stood up with the attorneys and introduced himself as "Pete Kott, the defendant." Since then he's been a quiet shadow sitting between his attorneys. Witness Rick Smith has a supporting role to Bill Allen. So let me try on this story as an interpretation of some of what is happening here in court.

We have a clash of two different cultures - a pre-modern, tribal world and a modern, legal world. In Bill Allen's world, as I tease it out of his words and behaviors, power and family are the main values. Loyalty is a second, but lower value. The law, the government, the legislature in particular are seen as either obstacles to be overcome or tools to get what you want. Allen is clearly an intelligent man. Coming from a poor family, as he told the story, where he and his family survived as 'pickers' of fruit and vegetables in Oregon, he often missed school to pick. He finally dropped out at 15 to earn money as an assistant welder. He has used his wits, his ability to work hard, and his ability to size up people, to create a business that earned between $750 million and $1 billion last year, according to his testimony. 

In the world he described, good and bad referred to how something would affect his business. Good legislation was legislation that would benefit - directly or indirectly - Veco's prospects. Good people were those who supported Allen and Veco. Money was a sign of power. And with money, this high school drop-out could show his power over the better educated. He could buy legislators. He paid Tom Anderson to be a consultant who did, apparently, very little for his monthly check. He paid for political polls for state legislative candidates. He handed out checks to legislators. They had audiences with Allen in the Baranof Hotel's Suite 604. But symbolically, he could really show his power by building the addition to Ted Stevens' house and by hiring Ted Stevens' son for $4000 a month to do "not a lot." The most senior Republican U.S. Senator was beholden to him. Surely, that's a sign of power. He even bought a newspaper - The Anchorage Times.  So all these educated people worked for him - a high school drop out who'd picked fruit as a child. 

Earlier in the trial, I'd thought perhaps loyalty was the main virtue in this world - the loyalty of the Pete Kotts. The loyalty of his Veco employees. He said he trusted Kott as a friend who would do whatever it took to support him. He told the court he'd put aside $10 million when Veco was sold, to support the loyal employees who'd worked for the company and made it what it was - not the executives, but the workers. 

But then I looked at the situation before me. Allen was the government's witness against his most loyal servant, Pete Kott. We've watched this tribal culture on HBO - in the Sopranos and in Rome. We see it in the car bombs of Baghdad. We even see it in the White House where the rule of law is trumped by the raw use of power, and the redacting of significant parts of the Constitution. If the rule of law has any meaning in this culture, it is might makes right. And when the FBI confronted Allen with hundreds of hours of secretly recorded audio and video tapes, he saw that their army of investigators and attorneys had more juice than Veco. In this conflict of power, the FBI had him by the balls, a graphic image that would say it all in Allen's world.   And to protect the ultimate core of a tribal culture, his family, he abandoned Kott and the others, to keep his family out of prison.  

This is not an immoral man. Rather this is a man who lives by a different code of right and wrong from the one that now judges him. Family and power come first. Loyalty to underlings comes next. He told the court he didn't expect anything from the Government for his testimony. He recognized their power, and in their place he would not treat his vanquished with 'fairness'. But he also had his own pride - in the powerful company he built by his own hands and wit, in his own hard work - and as he told Kott's attorney, "I won't beg" the government to lower his sentence. He'll take what comes as a man. He's protected his family, whatever else happens, happens.

This man who ruled by the pre-modern values of power and personal loyalty is put on trial by the rules of a modern state, where rationality, not personality count. Where merit, not loyalty and personal connections, is the standard. (A merit system generally prefers college degrees to dirty fingernails.) His behaviors are judged, not by power, but by laws. The kind of laws he paid legislators to write in his favor and that he ignored when they were in the way.  

I think it is important to recognize the good qualities in Allen. This is a man who, it would appear, was raised in a culture where poverty was bad and thus money was good. No one was there to help him, he had to help himself. The modern, civilized world failed him. It forced him to work as a child. The school system didn't work for him. The idea of rule of law wasn't, apparently, one he learned from his family and he wasn't in school enough to get it there. With what he had, he built a large corporation which gave him the power to take care of his family. He played well by the rules of tribal culture. 

And lest those of us who believe in the rule of law get too smug, tribal instincts are alive and well under the veneer of civilization we wear. We see it flare up in divorce courts, at football stadiums and boxing matches, among hunters and fishers. It's part of our humanity. We're still learning how to balance the tension between protecting our own and helping others, between the freedom of the individual and the good of the larger community.

 

Apeirogon Part 2: Fighting For Peace In A World Of Fear

Yesterday I gave you flowers, now back to graver stuff. But I think you'll find this inspiring.  

I've posted about Colum McCann's Apeirogon before.  It was not even an appetizer.  Less even than the menu.  And this might be a very light appetizer of a very heavy book.  

I'm going to take you to the crucible.  One of the two key sections that the book is leading up to and then retreating from.  This is section 500 - in the middle of the book. (I'm saying section because chapter isn't right.  Each section could be anything from a line to half a dozen pages.)  After section 500 comes section 1001. Then another section 500 and back down eventually to a second section 1.  

Rami and Bassam have both lost daughters - Rami to a suicide bomber in Jeruselum and Bassam to an Israeli police rubber bullet.  They've lived parallel but totally separate lives.  The narrator gives us glimpses at events, and then we see the events again, but from a slightly different perspective. There are a lot of birds who remind us they've been around much longer than the humans and that we are part of a much larger natural world.  

By section 500 we know Rami and Bassam quite well.  And we've walked through the scenes that led to their daughters' deaths and what happened in the following years repeatedly.  In their respective sections 500, Rami and Bassam put their whole stories together in one long narration each.  It takes place in Beit Jala in the West Bank.  When I went back to reread section 1, it was Rami riding his motorcycle up to the monastery, though I had no idea of how that would fit into the story then    

I'm going to give excerpts from Rami's speech to the people assembled in the monastery because I think it is extraordinary and very relevant to humans around the world and in the US.  

I think these passages are compelling, but readers might not be so inspired they way I've offered them.  But please read the bolded parts at least.

It begins:

"My name is Rami Elhanan.  I am the father of Smadar.  I am a sixty-seven-year-old graphic designer, an Israeli, a Jew, a seventh-generation Jerusalemite.  Also what you might call a graduate of the Holocaust.  My mother was born in the Old City of Jerusalem, to an ultra-Orthodox family.  My father came here in 1946.  What he saw in the camps he seldom spoke about, except to my daughter Smadar when she was ten or eleven.  I was a kid from a straightforward background - we weren't wealthy but we weren't poor.  I got in some trouble at school, nothing big, I ended up in industrial school, then studied art, more or less an ordinary life."

He talks about his time in the Army as a young man during the Yom Kippur war.  He went to art school afterward and met his future wife and had four kids.  

"I was doing graphic design - posters and ads - for the right-wing, for the left wing, whoever paid money.  Life was good.  We were happy, complacent.  To be honest it suited me. . .when this incredible bubble of ours burst in midair into a million pieces. It was the beginning of a long cold dark night the is still long and cold and dark and will always be longh and cold and dark, until the end when it will still be cold and dark.

I have told this story so many times, [as the author has leading us to this point] but there is always something new to be said.  Memories hit you all the time.  A book that is opened.  A door that is closed, a beeping sound, a window opened. Anything at all.  A butterfly. 

Then he describes in detail the day his daughter died.  Hearing about a bombing on the car radio and checking mentally where all his family should be that day.  Then calling to be sure everyone is ok. 

More details of what happened that day. Then the funeral.  The people who come to his house afterward - his wife's father was an important person in Israel and there are thousands at the house and in the streets.

"Look, I have a bad temper. I know it.  I have an ability to blow up.  Long ago, I killed people in the war. Distantly, like in a video game.  I held a gun. I drove tanks. I fought in three wars. I survived. And the truth is, the awful truth, the Arabs were just a thing to me, remote and abstract and meaningless.  I didn't see them as anything real or tangible.  They weren't even visible.  I didn't think about them, they were not really part of my life, good or bad.  The Palestinians in Jerusalem, well, they mowed the lawns, the collected the garbage, they built the houses, cleared the plates from the table.  Like every Israeli, I knew they were there, and I pretended I knew them, even pretended I liked some of them, the safe ones - we talked about them like that, the safe ones, the dangerous ones - and I never would have admitted it, not even to myself, but they might as well have been lawn mowers, dish washing machines, taxis, trucks.  . . And if they were ever anything other than objects, they were objects to be feared, because, if you didn't fear them then they would become real people. And we didn't want them to be real people, we couldn't handle that.  A real Palestinian was a man on the dark side of the moon.  This is my shame.  I understand it as my shame.  I know that now.  I didn't know it then.  I don't excuse myself.  Please understand, I don't excuse myself at all."

He continues about how he attempted to go on with his life - brushing his teeth, making posters at work. But thoughts invade.  Killing others won't bring his daughter back.  

"Then about a year after Smadar was killed, I met a man who changed my life.  His name was Yitzhak Frankenthal, a religious Jew, Orthodox, with a kippah on his head.  And you know, we tend to put people into drawers, stigmatize people?  We tend to judge people by the way they dress, and I was certain that this guy was a right-winger, a fascist, that he eats Arabs for breakfast.  But we started talking and he told me about his son Arik, a soldier who was kidnapped and murdered by Hamas in 1994.  And then he told me about this organization, the Parents Circle, that he had created - people who lost their loved ones, Palestinian and Israeli, but still wanted peace.  And I remembered that Yitzhak had been among the thousands and thousands of people that came to my house a year before during those seven days of shiva for Smadar, and I was so angry with him, so confused, I asked him, How could you do it?  Serious, how could you step into someone's house who just lost a loved one, and then talk about peace?  How dare you?  You came to my house after Smadar was killed?  You took for granted that I would feel the same way as you, just because I was Matti Peled's son-in-law or Nurit Peled's husband, you thought you could take my grief for granted?  Is that what you thought?"

". . . I got on my bike and I went to see.  I stood outside where people were coming for the meeting, very detached, very cynical.  And I watched those people arriving.  The first group were, for me - as an Israeli - living legends.  People I used to look up to, admire. . .

But then I saw something else, something completely new to me, to my eyes, my mind, my heart, my brain.  I was standing there, and I saw a few Palestinians passing by in a bus.  Listen, this flabbergasted me.  I knew it was going to happen, but still I had to do a double take.  Arabs?  Really?  Going into the same meeting as these Israelis?  How could that be?  A thinking, feeling, breathing Palestinian?  And I remember this lady in this black, traditional Palestinian dress, what a headscarf - you now, the sort of woman who I might have thought could be the mother of one of the bombers who took my child.  She was slow and elegant, stepping down from the bus, walking in my direction.  And then I saw it, she had a picture of her daughter clutched to her chest.  She walked past me.  I couldn't move.  And this was like an earthquake inside me:  this woman had lost her child.  It maybe sounds simple, but is was not.  I had been in a sort of coffin.  This lifted the lid from my eyes.  My grief and her grief, the same grief.

I went inside to meet these people.  And here they were, and they were shaking my hand, hugging me, crying with me.  I was so deeply touched, so deeply moved.  It was like a hammer on my head cracking me open.  An organization of the bereaved.  Israeli and Palestinian, Jew, Christian, Muslim, atheist, you name it.  Together.  In one room.  Sharing their sorrow.  .  . I cannot tell you what sort of madness it seemed.  And I was completely cleaved open.  It was like a nuclear event.  Truly, it seemed mad."

He tells us he was forty-seven or forty-eight at the time . . .

". . . it was the first time that I'd met Palestinians as human beings.  Not just workers in the streets, not just caricatures in the newspaper, not just transparencies, terrorists, objects, but - how do I say this? - human beings - human beings who carry the same burden that I carry, people who suffer exactly as I suffer.  An equality of pain.  And like Bassam says, we are running from our pain to our pain.  I'm not a religious person, far from it - I have no way of explaining what happened to me back then.  If you had told me years ago that I would say this, I would have said you were crazy." 

All that, so far, is so relevant to the US today.  Whether we are talking about blacks and whites, about rich and poor, about gay and straight, about men and women, about religious fundamentalists and atheists, about Republicans and Democrats.  So many are just objects, caricatures.

But it gets even more significant as we watch people like DeSantis try to ban people from knowing things he doesn't want them to know.  Organizations like Fox reporting fictional worlds as if they were real.  

"Some people have an interest in keeping the silence.  Others have an interest in sowing hatred based on fear.  Fear makes money, and it makes laws, and it takes land, and it builds settlements, and fear likes to keep everyone silent.  And, let's face it, in Israel we're very good at fear, it occupies us.  Our politicians like to scare us.  We like to scare each other.  We use the word security to silence others.  But it's not about that, it's about occupying someone else's life, someone else's land, someone else's head.  It's about control.  Which is power.  And I realized this with the force of an ax, that it's true, this notion of speaking truth against power.  Power already knows the truth.  It tries to hide it.  So you have to speak out against power.  And I began, back then, to understand the duty we have to try to understand what's going on.  Once you know what's going on then you begin to think:  What can we do about it?  We could not continue to disavow the possibility of living alongside each other.  I'm not asking for everyone to get along, or anything corny or airy-fairy, but I am asking for them to be allowed to get along.  And, as I began to think about this, I began to think that I had stumbled upon the most important question of them all:  What can you do, personally, in order to try to help prevent this unbearable pain for others?  All I can tell you is that from that moment until today, I've devoted my time, my life to going everywhere possible, to talk to anyone possible, people who want to listen - even to people who will not listen - to convey this very basic and every simple message, which says:  We are not doomed, but we have to try to smash the forces that have an interest in keeping us silent."

The pages on this blog rarely have such long quoted passages.  But there is nothing I can say that could possibly have more impact than the words the author puts on Rami's tongue.  (The book is described as fiction based on the lives of these two men.   The author, an Irish man who has experienced his own split world, tells us, that two two speeches at the center of the book - the one I'm quoting - and Hassam's - "are pulled together from a series of interviews in Jerusalem, New York, Jericho and Beit Jala, but elsewhere in this book Bassam and Rami have allowed me to shape and reshape their words and their words.") 

This is not a point A to point B book.  It wanders and winds and fills in details, not just of the stories of these two men, but the historical and biological context inform their stories. 

At times, too many times, in the history of human beings, things looked hopeless.  And for hundreds of millions of individuals they were. Yet those who survived eventually picked up the pieces and went on.  Hitler's thousand year Reich didn't last two decades.  The Soviet Union crumbled.  Slavery ended.  Jim Crow ended.  Women got the right to vote.  Russia's three day war in Ukraine is going on four months now.  

Our choice is to distract ourselves until we eventually get ground up (or somehow survive) or we can do as Rami has committed himself to do:  we have to try to smash the forces that have an interest in keeping us silent.

 

 

" . . . his father remembered a time when the dead person was carefully wrapped in birchbark and then fixed high in a tree."

 

I'm going to offer you the chapter "Cradle to Grave" from Louise Erdich's The Night Watchman. As I read it my body absorbed, in a new way, the meaning of the Anglo rulers rooting out the traditions, language, and knowledge of indigenous peoples.  And I realized that the GOP and evangelical Christian advocates of rooting out any mention of LGBTQ realities, women's rights, or the true history of the United States, of slavery, or even scientific truths,  rises from the same need to maintain one's own 'truths' by eliminating any competing 'truths.'

Stamping out other knowledge leads to ignorance which leads to total obedience.  Or so these would be tyrants believe. but the human mind has always  been resistant to these attempts.  Though the technology of modern marketing chips away and there are humans who would like to possess technology that controls what others know and think.  

Not only does such annihilation of ideas create obedience to "the one Truth" it delegitimizes the knowledge of the other culture.  This passage also shows us what we lose when we wipe out other cultural knowledge.  

My apologies to Louise Erdrich for quoting such a long passage.  This blog takes no ads and raises no money.  My hope is to share your wisdom and possibly get more people to read your book.  

"Thomas worked on the grave house while Wood Mountain finished up the cradle board.  They were working in Louie's barn because he had all of the tools - the saws, planes, rasps, the splitter, vise, hammer, and the sanding rocks.  Neither of them spoke.  Thomas was using a sharp chisel to dovetail the ends of the boards.  He didn't like using nails in a grave house.  He made a few rafters for the roof and then planed out the necessary shingles.  He'd seen them made with tar paper or bought shingles, but he felt close to Zhaanat as he worked - she had asked him to make the grave house because she knew he did it the old way.  Except, Thomas wondered, was this the really old way?  Biboon said that his father remembered a time when the dead person was carefully wrapped in birchbark and then fixed high in a tree.  It seemed better.  You were eaten by crows and vultures instead of worms.  Your body went flying over the earth instead of being distributed to the tiny creatures living under the earth. This grave house probably came about after they had been forced to live in one place, on reservations.  Mostly, they had Catholic burials.  He wanted to ask Wood Mountain which he thought was better, tree or dirt.  However, Wood Mountain was finishing the cradle board. 

"I suppose we shouldn't tell Zhaanat we were making the grave house and cradle board at the same time," he said to Wood Mountain.  

"You think it could be bad for the baby?"

"I'm not superstitious," said Thomas, although he certainly was.  Just not as bad as LaBatte with his fear of owls and his reading of random omens in everything.  Wood Mountain said that he'd light some sage and bathe the cradle board in the smoke to take the whammy off.

"That'll work," said Thomas. 

From the top of the cradle board, Wood Mountain was using Zhaanat's finest sanding tool - horsetail plant split and glued onto a piece of wood.  It was bringing out the narrow lines in the white cedar.  He had a jar of tea and a jar of vinegar in which he'd left some pennies for a week.  After he'd sanded the wood smooth, he painted the bottom of the cradle board with the tea, which gave it a soft brown color.  He painted the top of the wood with the penny vinegar, which tinged the wood with pale blue including the head guard.  He tied several pieces of sinew to the head guard.  sometimes he found small ocean shells while working in the fields.  Some were whorled;  others were tiny grooved scallops.  He drilled holes in them and hung them from the lengths of sinew. 

"Barnes was saying there used to be an ocean here," he said to Thomas.

"From the endless way-back times."

"Think of it.  Vera's baby will be playing with these little things from the bottom of the sea that was here.  Who could have known?"

"We are connected to the way-back people, here, in so many ways.  Maybe a way-back person touched these shells.  Maybe the little creatures in them disintegrated into the dirt.  Maybe some tiny piece from that creature is inside us now.  We can't know these things."

"Us being connected here so far back gives me a peaceful feeling," said Wood Mountain.

"That's what it's all about," said Thomas.  "And now we're putting another man in the earth.  Maybe a drunk, but he wasn't always a drunk."

"Sometimes when I'm out and around," said Wood Mountain, "I feel like they're with me, those way-back people.  I never talk about it.  But they're all around us.  I could never leave this place."

The United States would be a much healthier and spiritually  richer society today had it not been for the arrogance of white, Christian conquerors who believed they had the right to dispossess the indigenous people of their land and languages and customs.  Or the right to dispossess African slaves of their freedom and their labor.  

But that need for unquestioned power and obedience still lives among many in this nation and in this world.  I have no issue with spirituality and religions that try to guide people to experience their spirituality.  The Bible or Koran and other religious texts as allegory, as fables, that bring people comfort in times of sorrow and decency in times of opportunity, are fine.  But as literal truth to be thoughtlessly obeyed, a religion becomes the tool of authoritarian tyrants and demagogues.  

Trump, among others, gave permission to many to act on these selfish, evil impulses.  We'll get past this, but at great cost.  For those whose lives have been untouched by gun violence or climate change, or racial hatred, your escape is only temporary. Actually we've all been at least indirectly impacted even if we don't realize it.  If we don't overcome the dominance of oil wealth and drastically cut back our use of carbon based products, life will be unbearable for the vast majority of human beings.  And I worry for my grandchildren.

As the passage from The Night Watchman shows, the indigenous peoples of North America had spiritual beliefs and physical skills that kept connected to each other and to the earth for thousands of years.  Knowledge the immigrants from Europe could have benefited from if they hadn't tried to wipe it out.  

The AK Redistricting Board's Amateur Decision Making Process - Plus Marcum and Binkley Reasons For 3B Votes

In my previous post, I put up the video of the meeting where the three Republican Redistricting Board members go through their reasons for choosing Option 3B.  It also includes Board member Borromeo's rejection of those assertions and a plea to Judge Matthews to just fix the map himself and not remand it to the Board because they aren't going to change.  

In the post prior to that I went through Board member Budd Simpson's reasons for supporting Option 3B - as he laid them out in Wednesday's meeting - and pointed out problems I had with his reasons.  I thought this next post I would do the same with member Marcum's and member Binkley's reasons.  (And I do that as sort of an addendum to this post at the bottom.) But it seemed to be more useful to demonstrate that their reasons do not add up to a good, professional decision making exercise.   And in doing that, try to summarize their strategy so it's easier to understand what they did and what they didn't do, in terms of good decision making.  (But I wasn't quite done with it and so I put up the video of that meeting yesterday instead.)

Using a decision making model allows me to establish the flakiness of how they - in their words and actions - decided that Option 3B was the best option.  Because flaky as it might seem to many, the districts they created, while not optimal, could be considered Constitutional by the courts.  That depends on how they interpret "as contiguous as practicable."  Since other criteria, such as deviation and compactness, are applied more strictly in densely populated urban areas than more sparsely populated rural areas, why shouldn't contiguity be treated the same?  It's much easier to be contiguous in a densely populated area.  Will they see that such an urban/rural differentiation makes sense now?  At least in Anchorage.  

But if the Courts view the maps as basically in compliance with the Contiguity requirement, the other way I see that they might block the map is  by deciding it was politically motivated gerrymandering.  Part of the evidence for reaching that  conclusion is to:

• realize that the Board's decision making was haphazard at best,  simply the application of anecdotal evidence to 'prove' the 3B map was the best, because it's not the best on objective measures
• wonder why the majority fought so hard for Senate pairings that ignore the obvious pairings and force together much less natural pairings and  
• conclude there was an unspoken (by the majority) reason - getting another Republican Senate seat.

So first a brief description of what good decision making should NOT look like from a 1998 Harvard Business Review article, The Hidden Traps in Decision Making:

"So where do bad decisions come from? In many cases, they can be traced back to the way the decisions were made—the alternatives were not clearly defined, the right information was not collected, the costs and benefits were not accurately weighed. But sometimes the fault lies not in the decision-making process but rather in the mind of the decision maker. The way the human brain works can sabotage our decisions."

The article is more interested in the problems with the mind of the decision maker, and while I'm sure exploring the hidden biases in brains of the decision makers would yield fascinating results, we don't have to go there to find serious problems with the Redistricting Board's decision to select Option 3B over Option 2.  

If anyone wants to know what went wrong - and it's clear the decision was wrong from a public interest perspective - we need look no further than

1. the alternatives were not clearly defined, 
2. the right information was not collected, 
3. the costs and benefits were not accurately weighed

Click to enlarge
More detailed maps with the Simpson post

1. the alternatives were not clearly defined, 
1. The Board settled into two map options.  
2. One offered by the East Anchorage Plaintiffs - Option 2
3. One offered by Randy Ruedrich - Option 3B
4. They could have made more, but didn't.
5. The 3B Option chose to 
1. Pair north Muldoon (D20) with south Muldoon (D21)
6. That left D22 as an orphan district (not connected to another district to make a Senate district)
1. The two key options were to connect with D24 (to the north above the map) or D9.  Both were connected to other house districts, so both required at least one more change.  
2. Majority basically decided that 24 was not available because it was paired with 23 and they weren't going to change that.  
7. So the next choice was D9.  

So, basically, the majority had only ONE choice - pairing 22 with 9.  So, no, the alternatives were not clearly defined.  

1. [This loose 1. is here because I haven't figured out how to do lists that I can break for a moment and then continue on Blogger.  I even tried to make them white so you can't see them, but they are independent.  There will be more at 3.  If anyone has a suggestion I'm listening.]
2. the right information was not collected, 
1. The only information that the Board collected in any sort of organized way in the whole process was related to maps.  They used the census data and the Autobound software organized that data for the Board
2. The Board collected anecdotes, personal preferences, justifications, but did not pursue collecting data that would help verify which of these vague notions about the Senate seats was accurate
3. The Board was given more anecdotes, personal preferences, and justifications via the public testimony (I've offered a methodology for evaluating that here)
4. The Board received some actual data and information via the public testimony 
5. The majority did not study the data and information that came in.  Rather, they picked things that supported their preference and ignored data that didn't (example:  JBER students going to ER High School.  They cited Lance Pruitt's assertion that ER High School wouldn't exist without JBER.  They ignored Denny Wells statistics that showed more JBER residents live in areas of the bases zoned for West High and Bartlett.  And they never compared how many D9 students went to high schools in D22 or vice versa.)
6. This was a giant gap for the Board.  While they hired technicians for the technical mapping data gathering and organization, the only other professional decision making expertise used for evaluating how well they met the non-numerical criteria for redistricting was to hire the VRA expert. Most of that debate was hidden from the public and I'm guessing led Marcum to pair D22 with D20 because the VRA expert said pairing D22 with D21 (north Muldoon) wouldn't work because of the diversity of that district.  That would have been the majority's ideal pairing because it would have forced popular Democratic Sen Bill Wielechowsk into an Eagle River district.  But that's speculation on my part.  What's key is that they did not remotely follow the three steps of decision making outlined in the excerpt above.

1. 
   
2. 
   
3. the costs and benefits were not accurately weighed
1. The majority never compared the two basic options which were:
1. Pairing  22 and 24  versus pairing 22 and 9
2. Instead, they
1. took pairing 22 and 24 off the table from the beginning and
2. thus made it impossible, in their minds, to pair 22 and 24
3. used anecdotal information to argue the benefits of pairing 22 and 9
4. used anecdotal information to argue why 23 could not be separated from 24
5. used anecdotal information to argue why 23 could not be combined with 17 
6. only looked at data that favored what they wanted and disfavored what they didn't want
3. I say anecdotal because there were reliable or valid numbers available to evaluate,  that could be put into tables that neatly outlined factors that would help them compare how well each pairing met the constitutional criteria. (Actually the only criterion for Senate seats is contiguity, but that didn't stop them from talking about socio-economic integration (9SEI)when they thought it would help their cause.  They pointed out the primacy of contiguity when the proponents of Option 2 discussed SEI.
4. They never gathered objective numbers to fill into the non-existent cost/benefit chart (in this case perhaps advantages/disadvantages chart)

This was not professional decision making.  This was just marshaling claims and assertions to back up a decision that clearly had already been made:  To keep Senate seat L (D23 and D24) intact.  

Why all this effort to pretend that pairing D22 with D9 was the only option they had?  And was far superior to D22 and D24?    And what was the problem with pairing D23 with D17 ( downtown)? In Marcum's words, "Choosing option 2 is an intentional attempt to break up that natural pairing [23/24].  JBER should be with Chugiak." 

But these aren't dumb people.  

The only explanation that makes sense to me is one that the Court already found them guilty of:  political gerrymandering.  The proclamation plan would have given them (and Eagle River) control of two Senate seats.  The Court specifically broke up one of those (D21/D22).  Pairing D22 with D21 gave Eagle River control over a Senate seat that was half a swing district. Pairing D22 with D24 would force them to give up control over another swing district. (D23)  Eagle River would end up with just one solidly red Senate Seat.  So they had to pair D22, not with the obvious match Eagle River seat D24 - a perfect Senate seat by all the normal criteria - but with D9, across the mountains and with no adjoining neighborhoods.  And that would force pulling D9 apart from D10, another reasonable community of interest.  

And that's what they did. Since this doesn't make logical sense from a redistricting perspective and they had to manipulate data to pretend that it did, one has to ask why?   

Is it possible there is another explanation?    Given the attempted gerrymandering the first time around and the fact that this time the three Republican Board members teamed up to support a map made by Randy Ruedrich and voted for that map over the strenuous objections of the other two Board members, it's pretty compelling.  

Addendum:  Based on my notes from the Wednesday, April 13, 2022 Board meeting.

Board Member Bethany Marcum's Reasons for supporting Option 3B

[Board member's comments in black, mine in red]

Marcum:  I’m very uncomfortable with Option 2 because it moves JBER and links it with D17.  It makes the least sense for any possible pairings.  Downtown is the arts and tourism center, that's not what makes up JBER.  It is used to wake up?? the military community.  Choosing option 2 is an intentional intent to break up that natural pairing.  JBER should be with Chugiak.  

It was hard to sit through these comments without putting my hands over my face.  She’s just pulling words and ideas out of the blue here.   Let’s look carefully at the majority’s defense of 3B strategy.  

The first step is to assume the Chugiak/Eagle River(24) and JBER/Government Hill (D23) Senate district is untouchable.  That’s because this is the last district left for them to pull an extra Republican Senator from.  In the same way that the courts found linking (ER) D22 and south Muldoon (21) was political gerrymandering because it ‘cracks’ D21, this pairing ‘cracks’ D23.  

How?  Eagle River is solidly White, comfortably middle class, and Republican, Trump Republican.  It’s the voters who elected Lora Reinbold  and Jamie Allard.    D23 is, in general, lower income, and far more diverse.

Both Simpson and Marcum refer to D23 as the JBER district although 1//3 of the population does not live on JBER.  Other factors:  many military either don’t voter or they vote in their home states.  The JBER precincts had fewer people voting in the last few elections (including 2020) than the non-JBER districts even though they outnumber them 2-1.   So this is a perfect district to pair with a strongly Republican district.  Higher income white neighborhoods have a higher voting percentage than lower income diverse neighborhoods, so Eagle River will dominate Senate races.  As has been pointed out at different times in this process, when a Muldoon house district was paired with ER in the 2011 redistricting process, a popular Senator, and the only black in the State Senate at that time, was handily defeated by ER voters.  

It would appear the Republican majority of the Board is working hard to keep this district for themselves.

So, basically, they start out by putting it to the side, not even to be considered, as they look for a partner house district for a D22 Senate pairing.

But D23 is NOT just JBER.  It’s 1/3  off base, Downtown-adjacent neighborhoods.  

And if JBER and downtown are so different they can’t be paired, why did the Board  make a house district that does just that:  puts downtown in with JBER?  You can’t have it both ways.  It was ok as a house district, but not as a Senate District?

And none of the majority have considered the reverse problem of lumping Government Hill folks in with Eagle River.  If it’s bad one way, then it should be bad the other way.  But that doesn’t help their case.

I’ve been listening to the Redistricting Board debates since December 2020.  I don’t recall people talking about Downtown as the arts and tourism center of Anchorage before and I’m not sure why she thinks the military have no interest in the arts.  They don't go to the museum? They don't go to the Performing Arts Center?  She didn’t mention that downtown is probably the bar/tavern center of Anchorage too because she knows it would be harder to keep a straight face saying the young soldiers don’t spend time in the downtown bars.  

While Marcum has taken umbrage when people have characterized her intent, she has no problem jumping to the conclusion that pairing D23 with downtown is an intentional attempt to break up “the natural pairing” of JBER and Chugiak/Eagle River.  See, it’s just such a natural pairing that it’s off the table when we make these adjustments.  And I suspect that Marcum has convinced herself of this.  The problem is that pairing D22 with D24 is the most natural pairing to be had.  It’s not just me saying that.  Lots of people did, including Dr. Chase Hensel and Dr. Phyllis Morrow.  Dr. Hensel was the expert witness for the East Anchorage plaintiffs.  The two submitted about six pages of testimony about why the two ER districts were a community of interest, the crux is this:

“Because a large data set informs the question of whether and to what degree a population constitutes a community of interest, it can be a judgment call as to where the boundaries of a community of interest lie. In the Eagle River case, however, there is no question: all the signposts point in the same direction.”    

You can read it all in the public testimony listed for April 7-April 8 on pages 327 - 332.  

In that same file there is testimony (pp. 312-316)  from Doug Robbins who offers a long list of references to “Chugiak Eagle River” by the Municipality, by businesses, by Eagle River organizations, to make the point that we all know that Chugiak Eagle River is the most natural pairing.  

Marcum:  Looking back at E Anchorage lawsuit.  Challenged K and L.  L - 23/24, not found to be invalid.  Both are proposals we are not considering.  Both addressed K issue the same way.  It’s what the E Anchorage plaintiffs wanted, satisfactory.  Those individuals still very involved pushing one plan over the other.  Why are they investing themselves in this?  I have to conclude there is political motive.  

I’d have to go back and review the East Anchorage plaintiffs’ suit before commenting on what it did or didn’t do.  

 I have learned over the years that people often project their own thinking and actions on to others.  The Supreme Court found the majority Board members had politically gerrymandered the map.  And so with no proof offered other than they are proposing Option 2, Marcum concludes it’s political.  I’m guessing that she knows that her preference against the common sense pairings, is for political reasons, then opposing her choice must also be for political reasons.  There are other reasons to do things, like fairness and equity in voting.

I didn’t gerrymander.  Here’s why I support pairings.

Courts ruling on Senate K - key response created Muldoon Road district.  

When you put 20 and 21 together, you are left with 22 empty.  The only pairing is D9.  

This is exactly what Simpson said.  The other part of Eagle River (D24), what is known by so many organizations and people as Greater Chugiak and Eagle River, is not an obvious pairing?  Only if you’re locking D24 with D23.  The rational way to proceed is to look at the two adjacent districts - D24 and D9.  When you do that and measure the pairings by every criteria (other than political advantage) then the obvious choice is D24 and D22.  And since it is so obvious, Marcum and Simpson have simply taken that option off the table.  D24 and D23 is a done deal, end of discussion.  So all that is left is D9.  

That leaves 10 without a partner.  ???  That leaves 14 stranded and requires a new pairing.  Take two primary midtown roads.  Four remaining districts 23/24   17/18 same as current    11/12  no changes.  15/16   four changes that result from responding to court ruling and four that remain the same.  

In comparison, Simpson had a set of points and arguments that he went through.  Like Marcum, pairing D22 with D24 was never an option.  So there were never any comparisons of that pairing with the D22/D9 pairing.  Because everything they said about how compatible D22 and D9 are - non-urban neighborhoods, mountainous, wild life encounters (as though those don’t also happen in the Anchorage bowl), fire and snow, service areas for roads - all that is true and a much better match with D24 than D22, as former ER representative/senator Randy Phillips testified.

So let’s move on to Chair John Binkley’s reasons.

Binkley:  Thank you Bethany.  My position.  Then the second round.  Outpouring of public testimony.  Shows me Alaskans are engaged.  Seven different public hearings.  Heard from 100 Anchorage residents.  Heartening that Alaskans care.  People are supportive or opposing one of the other. We step back it’s our job to replace Sen K  - concerned with our pairing of 22 and 21.  Heartening that both proposals repaired that.  It is noteworthy that is how we solved the problem.   

No dispute with them on the process. 

Heard from people that  D22 and D24 should be paired.  Those people are articulate about how ER Chugiak, Peters Creek are closely tied together.  But as Budd pointed out earlier, the two Republican Senators and former Sen President all testified they should be together.  There are factions in the Republican Party who think they should be paired.  Budd mentioned another member of the administration.  Also supported 22 and 24 together.    I take it seriously and those are legitimate moves by people

Let’s give him points for even talking about the D22 and D24 option.  He did not rule it out from the get go.  He likes to ramble a bit and seems to have gotten off the prescribed talking points.

But also heard similarities between 22 and 9.  Both more rural, larger lot sizes.  Single family homes.  Served by road service districts.  Share the Chugach state park.  Close to mountains, deal with wildlife, wildfire danger.  Could be important.  Most house districts are compact and larger districts large rural districts on the outskirts.  Also heard that ER and Hillside were once in a single house districts - met a higher standard.  

The judge said that the Board members’ simple preference doesn’t outweigh the preponderance of public opinion.  Binkley has given us NO hard data to support his feelings about this.  There is no serious comparison of the two possible Senate pairings.  Just words with little or no factual support.  And in the past Eagle River didn't have a big enough population to form two house seats so the population was shared with other house seats.  

I'd also note that nine of the 2021 map districts border Chugach State Park either directly or border other park land that spills into the park.  And no district in town is more than 15 minutes from Chugach State Park.  

JBER in District 23 one of the most compelling.  Extends from D23 into D24.  If underlying house districts different it could have been done differently.  

The only one who recognizes something about how D23 was drawn.  But he doesn’t explain what he means.  Perhaps if they hadn’t made the district 1/3 off base, downtown adjacent?  He also doesn't mention that Government Hill in D23 extends from D23 to D17 (downtown).

Really active and retired military reside in 24 and have that connection to 23.   Direct highway connection Arctic Valley and closer to town.  Also heard testimony to JBER and N Muldoon.  Also legitimate.  Not an option presented to us.   

He’s saying here, I think, that he heard compelling testimony that pairing the JBER with N. Muldoon was another option, but it was “not an option presented to us.”   Excuse me?!  You are chair of the Board.  It’s the Board’s job to create the maps.  Why didn’t you pursue that option yourself if you thought it viable?  Are you saying the Board’s hands are tied? Unless someone else offers an option they can’t entertain it?  

But, of course, the East Anchorage plaintiffs’ preference was to pair the two Muldoon districts, so they didn't  offer it to you.  And the other option was a map which both member Marcum and Randy Ruedrich prepared independently (according to Marcum.)  But if you start with the assumption that  the D24 and D23  pairing is untouchable,  then it wouldn’t be hard to come up with the rest of the maps exactly the same.  

I don’t find compelling the idea of JBER with downtown Anchorage. For 13 years I’ve had a condo here and  been in that district for work and with Alaska RR and in my experience the downtown area part of D23 is dominated by professional services.  

Hearing this, member Borromeo jumped in and said something like, “You deferred Anchorage to Marcum because you said you didn’t know Anchorage well, and only now you are telling us you had a condo in Anchorage for 13 years?

Just moments before Marcum said that Anchorage is the arts and tourism center of Anchorage.  Now it’s portrayed as dominated by professional services.  But no data, no statistics to back up either claim.  Just feelings, personal experience in the past.  I’m not saying that there aren't art galleries and a museum downtown or that there aren’t professional services.  But why does this make the district incompatible with the Base?  There actually wasn't much testimony from the base.  The only person I recall is retired Air Force doctor Felisa Wilson and she said people on the base use their nearest gates and the base should be connected to the part of Anchorage nearest their gate.

Military is a community of interest

Did everyone notice how all three pointed out the commonalities between the pairings they favored and the lack of commonalities between the pairings they opposed?  And how they are long on rhetoric and short on documented evidence?   

I’d point out one more thing.  They’ve spent a lot of time saying that every part of Anchorage is socio-economically integrated to dismiss such comments for house districts and senate pairings they opposed.  But now that’s pretty much their whole argument.  Even though Socio-Economic Integration is a criterion for House districts, but not Senate districts.  Though the related concept of community of interest is considered in Senate districts.

I believe we have two good options.  I’m more comfortable with Option 3B.  I plan to support.

"I feel more comfortable with", not, ‘the preponderance of evidence clearly shows 3B is the plan to support.”  Because the preponderance of evidence goes the other way.  And they did their best to not have any sort of direct, professional comparison of the two key options:  22/24 ER and 22/9 ER/Hillside.

I’d make one final point:  Although the Board members cited the extensive public testimony, there was no serious analysis of that testimony.  I offered a methodology for that there.

Nor did the Board do any serious evaluation of their options.  The Option 2 folks seemed to have gathered more specific reasons.  The Option 3B people, even Simpson’s organized list of reason - had sound bytes and talking points that were based on personal preference rather than any hard data that compared the potential Senate pairings.  And as I said, early on, their strategy was to

Claim Senate District L (23 and 24) as a done deal, the ideal pairing that shouldn’t be touched.

They claimed D23 as the JBER district, even though 1/3 of the district lives off base around downtown and other north Anchorage neighborhoods.  

So their only option left is pairing 22 with 9.  

Me again in black.  There are just so many details that could be added in.  As it is, I'm trying the patience of all but the most obsessed redistricting folks.  The mass of data makes it hard for people who haven't followed closely to see the forest for the trees.  

[UPDATE April 18, 2022, 6pm:  Someone did text me some suggestions for getting into the html code to make my own fix for the numbered list.  Thanks!   Also someone sent to me:  

"Must Read Alaska" is written by a former Republican Party Communications Director in Alaska and runs a sensationalist right wing blog on Alaska politics even though now she apparently lives in Florida.  While Board member Simpson said the fact that some Republican current and former Senators opposed Option 3B proved 3B wasn't partisan, Ms. Downing's headline here seems to acknowledge the obvious.]

How Should The Redistricting Board Weigh The Public Testimony

This is a longish post that combines lots that's happening with the Redistricting process.  The hardest part was probably leaving out relevant, but not the most relevant, issues.   That still makes for a long and, for many, a complicated post.  In the end I am presenting Part I - how to do the evaluation.  I'm hoping next to do Part II which will look at the written testimony.  

Let me give you a sort of executive summary here at the beginning:

1.  The Basic Question:  How should the Redistricting Board use the public testimony in deciding whether to adopt Option 2  or Option 3B?

2.  Legal Background:  The Court ruled that the Board did not take adequate account of public testimony after the original plan was challenged.  The Board's attorney, in the appeal to the Supreme Court argued the judge wanted to substitute public opinion for the the Board's decision making.  He also claimed the judge's decision would make this a more political process.  He also said there was no procedure for evaluating public testimony.

3. Evaluating Public Testimony:  Qualitative Research has an established history and methodologies for measuring what people say that the Board can use to evaluate the testimony.

4.  Suggested Method and Examples:  I offer a relatively simple procedure the Board could use.  Noting attorney Singer's warning about this turning into a political rather than a rational decision making process, I offer ways the Board can avoid this.  

5.  Coming Next:  I'm hoping to follow this post with one that takes this methodology and takes a preliminary look at the written testimony that the Board has posted on its website.  

1.  The Basic Question  - The Board is now down to Option 2 and Option 3B. (You can see maps of the two - plus Cantwell - here.)

Option 2 was brought forward by the original plaintiffs who sued the Board over the pairing of Eagle River and South Muldoon in Senate Seat K.  Both courts agreed it was political gerrymandering - that it tried to give Eagle River two seats by 'cracking' south Muldoon.  That is, pairing a poorer more diverse district with an economically better off white community that always votes Republican and this would result in the South Muldoon voters not being equally represented.  This plan follows the Court's ruling and pairs North and South Muldoon together, then pairs the two Eagle River districts together, and then pairs JBER/Government Hill and downtown together.  

Option 3B was originally put forward by Randy Ruedrich, the former chair of the Republican Party of Alaska.  He also had a hand in the original plan that was thrown out by the court. 3B also pairs North and South Muldoon.  But then it pairs Chugiak/ER with JBER/Government Hill and the other Eagle River district with the Anchorage Hillside all the way south past Girdwood to Whittier.  The two Eagle River districts are split through neighborhoods and then paired with districts that do not have such neighborhoods in common.   House District 22 is 'contiguous' with House District 9, not with populated neighborhoods, but with the unpopulated Chugach State Park.  The residents of these districts have to drive 15-87 miles to reach each other.  The other ER House District 24 is paired with JBER/Government Hill (D23) - also along unpopulated areas, and again with the need to drive through several other districts to get to the other side of the district.  

If my description seems biased, well I'm only stating the facts.  Quite a few people who testified said that this is not a hard decision. That it's only hard because the three Republicans who voted 3-2 for the original unconstitutional pairing, seem to be headed toward doing the same thing, which will undoubtedly give Eagle River a second Senate seat and the State Senate an extra Republican Senator.  There isn't much hidden here.  It's pretty out in the open.  It's been noted that the 2011 redistricting plan set up a similar cracked Senate seat and in the following election Eagle River voters knocked off the only black State Senator.  

2.  Court Ruling on Public Testimony and the Board's Pushback

The trial court ruled, in part, that the Board did not pay enough attention  to public testimony when making some of its decisions.  

In the Redistricting Board's response to trial court Judge Matthews decision that the Board must take public testimony into account, Board's attorney Matt Singer argued:  

"the trial court’s rule asks the Board to compromise the requirements of Section 6 in order to do the bidding of a majority of public testifiers."(p.32)

He also wrote: 

"The trial court places quantity of testimony over quality" (p. 30)

Actually, the judge's ruling was a lot more subtle than that.  He explained his decision and reasoning in detail from page 131 - 143 of his ruling.  He concludes the discussion thus:

"If the Board adopts a final plan contrary to the preponderance of public testimony, it must state on the record legitimate reasons for its decision." (p. 143)

The Board's attorney went on to argue that the judge's ruling turns redistricting into a political popularity contest - the most votes win.  I've highlighter some parts of that argument:

"Contrary to the trial court’s intent, its new rule will further politicize the redistricting process and be harmful to Alaskans. The following foreseeable harms will flow from the new constitutional rule and duty:

 The trial court places quantity of testimony over quality. This provides incentive for political parties, partisans, and interest groups to pack public hearings and file volumes of pre-written testimony. The rule even encourages interest groups to pay participants, as is occurring already in other states.134 Dark money will be used to buy written testimony and will pay for the public testimony of political partisans.135

The judge did not put quantity over quality, but I can see that words like "preponderance" could lead Singer to think that. 

•   The rule places power in special interest groups who mobilize partisans to attend hearings and hijack the process. With Skagway, for example, the trial court emphasized in-person testimony over written testimony, suggesting that the Board should give special treatment to those who have time and resources to appear before it.136

Actually, this is how public participation works.  Different groups mobilize their supporters by letting them know what issues are being decided and getting them to attend meetings and write letters, etc.  Usually politicians can distinguish between legitimate personal testimony and partisan manufactured testimony.  Though in many legislative bodies it's lobbyists, not the public, who have sway anyway.  

  The rule turns a task of “Herculean” proportions into an impossible task. The Board will now be required to tally and quantify public testimony in real time. It will have to endure public hearings that could go for days, as competing interest groups each try to gain an upper hand in the quantity of testimony. And instead of balancing the demands of achieving a 40-district map that is compact, contiguous, and socio-economically integrated for all Alaskans, the Board will also have to adjust map lines because 23 out of 36,000 people in Districts 3 and 4 want a Skagway-Downtown Juneau district, 15 people in Fairbanks want the Board to use a specific road as a district boundary, 20 people in Wasilla want the hospital in its district and not the Palmer district, 8 people in Spenard did not want their district to stray into downtown, and on, and on, and on.

If by tally, he means, they need to look carefully at the public testimony - not just sit there appearing to listen until the meetings are over - then this is a good thing.  It's useful to sort through testimony to see what arguments were raised and rebutted and then to carefully determine the best route.  Since the Board's staff was not really equipped to research all the kind of issues that came up, it's useful to have an active and competent public to supply that kind of information.  It needn't be just a quantitative measure.  

•   There is no legal standard for determining the “clear weight of public comment.” If only one person testifies on a topic, is that the weight of public testimony that trumps the judgment of the five Board members?

Actually, there is a well developed field of qualitative research analysis to help review testimony in a more meaningful way than just counting those for and against.  This is particularly useful here because:

"Data collected in qualitative research are usually in narrative rather than numerical form, such as the transcript of an unstructured, in-depth interview. Analysis of qualitative data organizes, summarizes and interprets these nonnumerical observations." (From National Library of Medicine)

Evaluating public testimony doesn't need to be a complicated social science dissertation.  We can use simple principles of qualitative research to get something reasonably useful for the Board.  

The last two weeks at the Redistricting Board have been an incredible demonstration of the power of open government.  All the hearings have been available in person at the Legislative Information Office (LIO), via Zoom, and by phone through the LIO system.  There has been a steady stream of people testifying via the phone and in person.  Only one day were there some gaps between testifiers.  Chair Binkley looked at the lack of callers online and lack of people waiting at the LIO and asked the Board if they should call it a day.  Member Borromeo argued that since it was advertised until 2pm they should go to 2pm and offered to chair the meeting.  Binkley signed off and the lines were held open.  Four or five more people showed up after that.  

In addition, people have used the Board's online feedback page to write their comments and I guess others have emailed comments.  There's been a wide array of comments.  It's been amazingly frank and sometimes partisan.  A few people have made comments five or more times.  But cumulatively, it was a chance for different arguments to be presented and for others then to counter those arguments.  Much of the written testimony was one-liners.  Other testimony was longer thoughtful explanations of why the person felt that way.  Some testimony added lots of factual data to counter the mostly anecdotal testimony of many.  The Board has heard a lot more about the advantages and disadvantages of their two competing options.  (I originally wrote "The Board has learned" but we don't know that.  They did hear it though.)

3.  So How Should We Evaluate The Data?

A first step is to go through the testimony and identify the concepts/ideas/ points made and codify them.  This doesn't have to be as complicated as it sounds.  

Having heard most of the oral testimony and having looked at much of the written testimony I'd say we can divide the testimony into 

• For Option 2
• For Option 3B
• Other

Here, "Other" would include comments that don't choose an option or that discuss other redistricting issues than the Senate seat K pairing.  

Yes, that sounds a little like what attorney Matt Singer was warning about, but this is just the first step. While we divide the comments into those three categories, we won't stop there.   Then we'll go through them to see the extent to which they add information to the discussion that is relevant to the decision.  

The Board's attorney warned it would turn into a simple partisan drive to drum up testimony.  He obviously doesn't think that's a good idea and neither do I.   The Board shouldn't just make a pile for Option 2 and one for Option 3B, count how many in each pile, and then say that equals the preponderance of public testimony. ]I'd like to offer a way to think about the comments.  

This needs to be fleshed out more, but here's basic idea.  

Attorney Singer pointed out the dangers of quantifying public opinion.  This is not a vote, it's information gathering.  The Board is responsible for creating a plan that meets all the constitutional and other legal requirements.  

The purpose of public testimony is 

• To raise issues - often local ones - that the Board overlooked to add to their decision making
• To provide preferences that can be taken into consideration once the Board has some clear, constitutional plans. 
• To avoid making politically partisan decisions by creating districts that are less constitutional but favor one particular political party.  

Process for evaluating comments

First we divide the comments based on topics.  In some cases there will be several topics in one comment.  We can put those into a "multi topic' pile and then go through them later.

Second, divide the comments in each group based not on content, but how the content is conveyed.  For example: 

• Opinion - unsupported - basically "a vote"
• Opinion - Supported
• by Feeling
• by Facts
• by Concepts/Principles
• Legal
• Other
• by argument that combines principles and supporting facts to show how the principles are or are not supported by the facts. 
• Other factors that could be considered
• Does it add new data?
• Does it raise issues and data that have-not been discussed before?
• Does it add new data that supports or counters previous testimony?
• Is it accurate?

This is pretty much a technical job.  Sure, different objective people might categorize comments slightly differently, but the point is to organize that data for the decision makers.  If there are questions, Board members can help decide.  

Third,  is to review the information to see how it affects the decisions the Board is going to make.  When you put all the data together does it change assumptions that Board members made about a community or about whether a constitutional requirement is met?

Then the Board can make its decision based on the constitutional requirements supported by facts.  

If the Board has two or more options that appear equally good or at least equally constitutional, then the Board can assess whether there is an obvious public preference for one option over others.  

But remember, that the Board took feedback about Cantwell and then broke some basic redistricting rules - breaking borough boundaries and compactness - to accommodate the suggestion.  The Court overturned that decision.

Final Notes

One of the criticisms of the Board from the courts was that they made decisions based on personal preferences.  It was pointed out that the Board members are not professional redistricting experts.  They don't have special technical, professional training in this field.  Merely stating personal preferences is not enough.  They need to test the validity of those preferences.  Do the facts support them?  For example:  Is there a unique military connection between districts?  Personal perception needs to be tested against hard numbers about where military live, their age, income, ethnicity, etc.    For most districts meeting constitutional requirements that don't upset the communities was not much of an issue.  For a few it was and the Board was challenged.  And if the Board doesn't do it right this time the Court likely will reject their decision again.  

What about "the preponderance of public opinion" that Judge Matthews mentioned?  The judge wrote that a Board member's personal preference does not override a preponderance of public opinion.  

So this process reviews that public opinion, tests the assertions and the facts presented, then writes up the reasoning for making the decision the Board makes.  It's not a popularity contest.  It's not a vote.  It's not an invitation for political parties to get their supporters to simply say they support one plan or another without any reasons given.  The point is for the Board to make a more informed and defensible decision and document how they did it, so the court can review it.

Next 

I'm hoping in the next post to look at the written comments that came in to the Board and try to apply this.  But it's sunny out, I've got a long todo list,  and I'm more than tired of looking at a screen.  But I'll try.