Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

New Jersey will vote on keeping gerrymandered map for two extra years

New Jersey statehouse

Democrats would be assured of dominating Trenton for another term if the referendum is OKd.

KenKPhoto/Getty Images

Voters will decide in November whether the next redrawing of New Jersey's legislative districts may be postponed for two years.

It will be one of the more unusual referendums addressing partisan gerrymandering — and yet another wrinkle in the running of democracy wrought by the coronavirus.

Democrats who control the Legislature say keeping current districts in place until 2023 is the fairest thing to do if population reports from the Census Bureau are delayed, which looks likely because of the complications of counting heads in a pandemic. That's a subterfuge for holding on to their seats for an extra term, Republicans complain, while good-government groups say the postponement would deny growing minority populations more influence in Trenton.


Legislators concluded the only way to get what they want was to ask the people to amend the state Constitution. The measure to put the language on the Nov. 3 ballot was cleared Thursday.

The timetable is unusually tight in New Jersey, because it's one of just two states that have legislative elections in 2021. (The other is Virginia, which will vote this fall on whether to assign redistricting to an independent panel, with its deadline for producing new maps not yet certain.)

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

If voters approve the measure, next year New Jersey will elect 120 legislators in the districts used since 2011 — assuming the census numbers are delivered after the middle of February. (Typically, the detailed data set is delivered by early March.) Lawmakers say this will provide the time needed to come up with fresh maps.

But that deadline is way too early, says the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, one of the groups opposed to the measure.

It would be possible to redraw the districts later and then delay the primary, which is usually in June, although maps drawn in the summer wouldn't leave much time to campaign in new territory for primaries in the early fall. Only a decade ago, when census results were late, the state responded by delaying the primary three weeks.

"This measure is unnecessary and it's extreme," said Republican state Sen. Kip Bateman. "It's not about fairness or accuracy. It's about protecting incumbents and the majority party's two decades of control in the Legislature."

The Princeton group maintains that pushing back an election is better than delaying redistricting because the latter would mean diluted voting power for the state's Latino and Asian-American communities, which have grown a combined 20 percent — more than 400,000 people — over the last decade, enough to become players in electing more state senators and House members.

The state's 12 congressional districts are redrawn using a separate process that won't be affected by this measure, and don't need to be remade as quickly in any case.

New Jersey is one of eight states that use independent redistricting commissions to draw new maps each decade for both Congress and the state legislature. Six other states do so for just the legislature.

Read More

People voting

Jessie Harris (left,) a registered independent, casts a ballot at during South Carolina's Republican primary on Feb. 24.

Joe Lamberti for The Washington Post via Getty Images

Our election system is failing independent voters

Gruber is senior vice president of Open Primaries and co-founder of Let Us Vote.

With the race to Election Day entering the homestretch, the Harris and Trump campaigns are in a full out sprint to reach independent voters, knowing full well that independents have been the deciding vote in every presidential contest since the Obama era. And like clockwork every election season, debates are arising about who independent voters are, whether they matter and even whether they actually exist at all.

Lost, perhaps intentionally, in these debates is one undebatable truth: Our electoral system treats the millions of Americans registered as independent voters as second-class citizens by law.

Keep ReadingShow less
ballot

The ballot used in Alaska's 2022 special election.

What is ranked-choice voting anyway?

Landry is the facilitator of the League of Women Voters of Colorado’s Alternative Voting Methods Task Force. An earlier version of this article was published in the LWV of Boulder County’s June 2023 Voter newsletter.

The term “ranked-choice voting” is so bandied about these days that it tends to take up all the oxygen in any discussion on better voting methods. The RCV label was created in 2002 by the city of San Francisco. People who want to promote evolution beyond our flawed plurality voting are often excited to jump on the RCV bandwagon.

However, many people, including RCV advocates, are unaware that it is actually an umbrella term, and ranked-choice voting in fact exists in multiple forms. Some people refer to any alternative voting method as RCV — even approval voting and STAR Voting, which don’t rank candidates! This article only discusses voting methods that do rank candidates.

Keep ReadingShow less
People voting
Paul J. Richards/Getty Images

Make safe states matter

Richie is co-founder and senior advisor of FairVote.

It’s time for “safe state” voters to be more than nervous spectators and symbolic participants in presidential elections.

The latest poll averages confirm that the 2024 presidential election will again hinge on seven swing states. Just as in 2020, expect more than 95 percent of major party candidate campaign spending and events to focus on these states. Volunteers will travel there, rather than engage with their neighbors in states that will easily go to Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. The decisions of a few thousand swing state voters will dwarf the importance of those of tens of millions of safe-state Americans.

But our swing-state myopia creates an opportunity. Deprived of the responsibility to influence which candidate will win, safe state voters can embrace the freedom to vote exactly the way they want, including for third-party and independent candidates.

Keep ReadingShow less
Map of the United States

The National EduDemocracy Landscape Map provides a comprehensive overview of where states are approaching democracy reforms within education.

The democracy movement ignores education races at its peril

Dr. Mascareñaz is a leader in the Cornerstone Project, a co-founder of The Open System Institute and chair of the Colorado Community College System State Board.

One of my clearest, earliest memories of talking about politics with my grandfather, who helped the IRS build its earliest computer systems in the 1960s, was asking him how he was voting. He said, “Everyone wants to make it about up here,” he said as gestured high above his head before pointing to the ground. “But the truth is that it’s all down here.” This was Thomas Mascareñaz’s version of “all politics is local” and, to me, essential guidance for a life of community building.

As a leader in The Cornerstone Project and a co-founder of The Open System Institute I've spent lots of time thinking and working at the intersections of education and civic engagement. I've seen firsthand how the democratic process unfolds at all levels — national, statewide, municipal and, crucially, in our schools. It is from this vantage point that I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, that the democracy reform movement will not succeed unless it acts decisively in the field of education.

Keep ReadingShow less