During a media briefing Monday, Voters Not Politicians Executive Director Nancy Wang said the panel must finalize maps that don’t contain broad efficiency gaps in order to ensure lines that aren’t gerrymandered, or drawn in a way that favors one party over another.
“There’s not a choice that needs to be made between respecting (communities of interest), and having the maps achieve partisan fairness. And I think given the presentation that the commission got on Friday, I think they’re going to start to see that as well,” Wang said.
“We’re hoping that they can systematically go through and make the changes that they need to do to achieve that partisan fairness, which many people have pointed out are not really in their maps right now.”
Voters Not Politicians spearheaded the 2018 effort for the ballot proposal that ultimately led to the redistricting commission.
The commission has adopted a Nov. 5 deadline for proposing final maps and a Dec. 30 deadline for actually adopting new districts. Michigan’s constitution requires the commission to adopt final maps by Nov. 1, but commissioners self-imposed a new timeline due to delays in necessary census data.
This story was originally published by the Holland Sentinel: https://www.hollandsentinel.com/story/news/politics/government/2021/10/05/michigan-redistricting-advocates-competitively-balanced-maps/5991292001/