Key House and Senate Republicans laid out a path Monday on court-ordered redistricting, suggesting that both bodies start with maps put forward by an expert in the case that got the old maps tossed.
The plan centers on roughly 1,000 maps drawn by a computer algorithm from Jowei Chen, a University of Michigan professor whose testimony helped convince a panel of Superior Court judges that General Assembly maps drawn by the GOP majority two years ago were so tilted toward Republicans that they constitute an illegal partisan gerrymander.
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Both the House and Senate would winnow those numbers down by having staff rank each map on a trio of criteria the court in Common Cause v. Lewis identified as particularly important, then amend them here and there in public votes.
Wary Democrats and others behind the lawsuit that got the current maps declared unconstitutional were anxious about the process Monday. Several times, they asked GOP leaders whether any analysis had already been done on the Chen maps, an insinuation that Republicans could have seen something they liked and reverse-engineered a process to get it.
House and Senate leaders said they had not looked at the maps beyond a handful discussed in some detail during the public trial. House Redistricting Chairman David Lewis, a named defendant in that case, said legislative staff learned they'd need to go through these maps only when he announced it during a Monday committee meeting. Senate redistricting chairs said legislative staff didn't yet have the data behind the maps.
But it didn't help the process when, late in the afternoon, a law firm for Republicans in the lawsuit sent reams of data to legislators on the House Redistricting Committee, as well as to legislative staff and attorneys for the other side, who were copied on the email. Included in the data: Partisan scores for each map. The three-judge panel in the case was quite specific about what legislators couldn't do while redrawing these maps, saying in their order that "election results data shall not be used."
The House Redistricting Committee adjourned for the day shortly after the email was revealed.
A pair of Democratic senators said they didn't think it would derail the process. Sen. Michael Garrett, D-Guilford, noted that attorneys for Republican legislative leaders have had this data for months. Stanton Jones, the lead attorney challenging the old maps for Common Cause, had confirmed that earlier in the day.
"It's just one of those glitches," Sen. Floyd McKissick, D-Durham, said. "Not a big deal."
Jones was not so sure, calling it “just obviously wildly inappropriate" after a day where legislators insisted they wouldn't use partisan data and leadership specifically told legislative staff not to give legislators statistics on election results, even if they requested them. Jones advised staffers and legislators who got the email, which also included some computer code of Chen's that the court designated confidential, to delete it, and to delete any information they'd downloaded.
“I don’t know whose seen it, whose downloaded it," Jones said. "(I don't know) whether it’s actually prejudicial to the process or it’s just a mistake that got corrected quickly.”
Lewis said in an emailed statement late Monday that he feared these objections were "a ruse." He said the legislature intended to input Chen's map data "in exactly the same format as it was given to us by the plaintiffs," but "those plans have been shelved based on Plaintiffs’ objections."
The plaintiffs had promised to send Chen's maps, without the partisan advantage scores, Monday night. Lewis, R-Harnett, said the House Redistricitng Committee would discuss approaches Tuesday.
"No criteria for judging maps by the Committee has or will include partisanship," he said. "To expedite the adoption of a plan, we are seeing if Plaintiffs can remove any objectionable data from Dr. Chen’s data/reports or if they have an alternative approach."
The three-judge panel in the case ordered unusual transparency in this redraw, going so far as to say computer screens must be visible to the public as any map is drawn. Lewis the House would draw maps only in an open committee room with proceedings streamed on the internet. In the Senate, Redistricting and Elections Co-Chairman Paul Newton said a bipartisan pair of Senate leaders would vet any amendments before a public vote to change one of Chen's map.
The judges made it clear that they'll be monitoring the process, ready to hand it over to their own expert if the legislature strays from the court order it sent down last week.
Before the partisan scores were sent out, Jones said the process Republicans described in committee meetings sounded like "a reasonable approach," but he emphasized that Chen's maps must be ranked in public. Senate Redistricting and Elections Co-Chairman Ralph Hise, R-Mitchell, said that process should be fairly mechanical, essentially like sorting a spreadsheet. But Jones said "there are tons of choices" to be made to pick a starting map, and the starting maps will be key.
Nearly a decade of lawsuits, multiple maps thrown out over gerrymanders and evidence unearthed as part of this trial that Republicans may have lied to the court in a previous case have eroded the trust at the statehouse. Republican leaders have gerrymandered "every map they've touched this decade," Jones said in a morning press conference, "they've behaved badly every single time."
At trial, Chen demonstrated for Common Cause that North Carolina's current General Assembly maps were a partisan gerrymander by comparing them to the thousands of maps he produced, every one of which would have been likely to elect more Democrats than the current maps, according to his report to the court.
Even so: Every one of the 1,000 maps Chen produced that avoided double-bunking incumbents – the universe of maps legislators plan to use for their redraw – still would have produced a Republican majority in both chambers, based on a statewide composite of election results from 2010 to 2016, Chen testified. Many of the maps would have produced Republican super-majorities, based on those election results.
Chen's computer drew these maps without relying on partisan data, Jones said, and the scoring was done later based on the past results.
The House and Senate committees were still working out details on their redraw plans Monday evening, and they planned to get back to it Tuesday morning. A number of logistical issues came up Monday, including about how to grade the Chen maps.
These are statewide maps, with statewide scores in the areas legislators plan to emphasize in picking maps to work off of: How compact the districts are, whether they avoid splitting voting precincts when possible and whether avoid splitting municipal boundaries. But the legislature was only ordered to redraw fewer than half of the state's legislative district, and several Democrats pushed Monday to rate Chen's maps cluster by cluster, focusing only on areas that must be redrawn.
Republicans were more interested in rating the maps statewide, and questioned whether they'll have the data to go cluster by cluster.
The two chambers will draw their own maps in the coming days, and the Senate is talking about paring the Chen maps down to the five that score highest in the three areas of focus. The plan in the House, as described by Lewis Monday, would key on the top 25 percent or so of these maps, again scored on the three factors. From there, the House Redistricting Committee would pick a base map to work from, ideally at random, Lewis said.
There was a suggestion from Democrats Monday that, since only Republican leaders were targeted in the underlying lawsuit, Democrats weren't bound by the court's admonition not to use political data in the redraw and to "conduct the entire remedial process in full public view."
Senate Minority Leader Dan Blue clarified that later in the day, after getting some blow back for his comments on social media.
"There's no double standard in here," he said. "This order involves all of us, but it doesn't say that we can't confer."
There was general agreement that, though the maps had to be drawn and decisions made in public, legislators could discuss the process with each other in private.
In his statement, Lewis said Republicans were "deeply concerned that plaintiffs and the Democrats may try to manipulate this process behind the scenes to provide the best political outcome for Democrats, turning the nonpartisan, public process the court ordered into a behind-closed-doors process."
Each chamber has about 10 days to produce new maps. The House Redistricting Committee meets again at 8 a.m. Tuesday. The Senate's committee meets at 9 a.m.
Senate Redistricting and Elections co-chair Warren Daniel asked staff to update legislators Tuesday on what analysis they can do on data that Common Cause's legal team planned to send in Monday night, and how long it might take.