Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission meeting, May 16, 2024 | Screenshot
The deadline is ticking closer for the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission (MICRC) to get court approval for half-dozen state Senate districts.
In May, commissioners finished drawing up 12 new maps, giving the public time to weigh in.
Officials stress they must adhere to a formula that balances using race as a factor, but only in specific circumstances.
The redraw was ordered by a federal court late last year, after it found 13 metro Detroit House and Senate maps violated the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause by improperly reducing Black voting percentages, preventing a “Black-preferred candidate” from successfully making it through a primary election.
“As the Supreme Court has put it, (Section 2) of the VRA (Voting Rights Act) requires that — when a minority group is large and compact enough to elect its preferred candidates, as black voters obviously are in Detroit — those voters cannot be broken up and “submerged in a larger white voting population” that usually defeats the minority group’s preferred candidates,” said the unanimous opinion signed by U.S. Circuit Judge Raymond M. Kethledge and U.S. District Court Judges Paul L. Maloney and Janet T. Neff.
After successfully redrawing seven new House districts in March, in time for elections later this year, the MICRC set about the task of doing the same for a new Senate map, as those elections aren’t until 2026. Judges gave the commission until June 27 to submit its final drafts to the court, so they can receive final approval by July 26.
The commission began the work on revisions to the six Senate districts in April, creating initial draft maps that were then put up for review at three public hearings in early May, allowing it to then finalize and publish online 12 possible maps.
While there has been criticism that only three of those maps provide a better level of “partisan fairness” than the originals, MICRC officials say they have a wider mandate to comply with in order to receive court approval.
MICRC Voting Rights Act counsel, Mark Braden, explained the task ahead at the commission’s May 16 meeting.
“Since we were successful last time with the House plan on getting approval of the compliance with the VRA by the special master…and by the court. I intend to follow that same procedure with the Senate plan and not make any changes in a generalized sense from that,” he said. “Since the old cliché is ‘Don’t mess with success,’ I would suggest that’s a cliché we should follow.”
Braden said court precedent sets up three preconditions for a district to be considered in violation of the VRA. The first is a district with a minority group that’s sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority of voters. Second, that minority group must be able to show that it’s politically cohesive, but then third, it must be able to demonstrate that the white majority voters vote sufficiently as a bloc to enable them to regularly defeat the minority preferred candidate.
Another factor to be considered is what’s called the totality of the circumstances.
“It’s really a question of whether or not the minority community has traditionally gotten its fair share of political power,” said Braden.
In other words, according to Braden, if the circumstances, both political and social, show that the process is not equally open to minority voters, action is needed.
“The commission, its experts, and the court, and the plaintiffs all agree that there’s legally significant polarized voting present in Michigan, and in the area under consideration here in the tri-county area, so you need to adopt plans that comply with the Voting Rights Act,” he said.
Braden told commissioners that the court ordered that race is not to be used in drawing up the maps, except in a very limited sense and at the very end of the process. As the court’s ruling made clear, the expert advice the commission received in the initial mapping told them the opposite.
“The record shows, overwhelmingly, that those experts … expressly told the commissioners, scores if not hundreds of times, to sort Detroit-area voters into different districts on the basis of race,” stated the opinion, which noted that the commission was advised they must limit the “black voting age population” to approximately 35 to 45%.
“That proposition is without support in the Supreme Court’s VRA caselaw,” the judges concluded.
With that in mind, and as their guiding principle, the commission has been determined not to consider race during the map drawing process, which they successfully did in creating the new House maps.
“So what we’re looking at here is not how many majority minority districts are drawn. We’re not looking at any set racial target. In other words, we don’t have a magic number that you have to get to,” Braden told the commissioners. “What we’re examining here is how many districts are likely to perform with the election of the Black candidates’ communities or candidates of choice.”
In practical terms, that means the commission can not make as its goal a guarantee of any particular outcome in the maps that they draw.
“That’s why we have elections,” said Braden. “But we do have tools that help us make strong predictions as to whether or not the choice of the Black communities are likely to win.”
Put more simply, the commission should focus on whether a particular Senate plan provides a “reasonably equal opportunity” for Black voters to elect their candidates of choice. The commission can do that through creating either majority-minority districts, crossover districts or some combination of the two in order to be in compliance with the VRA.
More importantly, in the areas they are looking at, the focus needs to be on primary elections and not general elections, as most of the general elections are not competitive on a partisan basis.
“So the Democrat[ic] candidate is almost always going to win, and that candidate is almost always going to be the choice in the general election of the minority community,” said Braden.
The analysis being conducted to help determine the VRA compliance of districts is based upon estimates of Black and white turnout in the Democratic primary. While that doesn’t guarantee any particular election result, it does provide a likelihood of success for the community.
“I think it’s difficult to argue that the Black community doesn’t have an equal opportunity to have a candidate prevail in a Democratic primary when it’s the majority of the people actually showing up to vote,” said Braden.
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