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Redistricting

Redistricting

Oklahoma reformers seek multi-partisan redistricting commission

Oklahoma Capitol

Currently, the Republican-controlled Oklahoma Legislature oversees the state's redistricting process every 10 years.

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Sara Swann
By Sara SwannOct 29, 2019
Sara Swann

As a staff writer, Sara covers a variety of democracy reform issues, including voting rights, money in politics, gerrymandering and civic education. Prior to joining The Fulcrum in May 2019, Sara reported on local government on Maryland's Eastern Shore for the USA Today network. She is a native West Virginian and a graduate of Syracuse University.

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A redistricting reform group is petitioning for Oklahoma's legislative and congressional maps to be drawn by a multi-partisan commission.

Through the petition, filed Monday, People Not Politicians aims to take the partisanship out of Oklahoma's mapmaking process. Currently, districts are drawn by the Republican-controlled Legislature and approved by the governor, who is also a Republican.

People Not Politicians is a bipartisan coalition of redistricting reformers, headed by the League of Women Voters of Oklahoma and Let's Fix This. The group will have 90 days to collect almost 178,000 signatures to have this redistricting commission measure placed before voters on the ballot in 2020.

If successful, the nine-person commission would consist of non-elected members from multiple political parties. Six of the members would be chosen by a panel of retired state judges, led by the chief justice of the Oklahoma Supreme Court. These six would then select the remaining members. Three of the commissioners would be Democrats, three Republicans and three would be unaffiliated with either major party.

Oklahoma joins a growing number of states seeking nonpartisan control of redistricting ahead of the 2020 Census. Last year, five states — Colorado, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio and Utah — passed legislation to reform their mapmaking process.

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Half-Baked Alaska

A photo of multiple checked boxes.

Getty Images / Thanakorn Lappattaranan

Half-Baked Alaska

This past year’s elections saw a number of state ballot initiatives of great national interest, which proposed the adoption of two “unusual” election systems for state and federal offices. Pairing open nonpartisan primaries with a general election using ranked choice voting, these reforms were rejected by the citizens of Colorado, Idaho, and Nevada. The citizens of Alaska, however, who were the first to adopt this dual system in 2020, narrowly confirmed their choice after an attempt to repeal it in November.

Ranked choice voting, used in Alaska’s general elections, allows voters to rank their candidate choices on their ballot and then has multiple rounds of voting until one candidate emerges with a majority of the final vote and is declared the winner. This more representative result is guaranteed because in each round the weakest candidate is dropped, and the votes of that candidate’s supporters automatically transfer to their next highest choice. Alaska thereby became the second state after Maine to use ranked choice voting for its state and federal elections, and both have had great success in their use.

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Top-Two Primaries Under the Microscope

The United States Supreme Court.

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Top-Two Primaries Under the Microscope

Fourteen years ago, after the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the popular blanket primary system, Californians voted to replace the deeply unpopular closed primary that replaced it with a top-two system. Since then, Democratic Party insiders, Republican Party insiders, minor political parties, and many national reform and good government groups, have tried (and failed) to deep-six the system because the public overwhelmingly supports it (over 60% every year it’s polled).

Now, three minor political parties, who opposed the reform from the start and have unsuccessfully sued previously, are once again trying to overturn it. The Peace and Freedom Party, the Green Party, and the Libertarian Party have teamed up to file a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Their brief repeats the same argument that the courts have previously rejected—that the top-two system discriminates against parties and deprives voters of choice by not guaranteeing every party a place on the November ballot.

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Ranked Choice Voting May Be a Stepping Stone to Proportional Representation

Someone filling out a ballot.

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Ranked Choice Voting May Be a Stepping Stone to Proportional Representation

In the 2024 U.S. election, several states did not pass ballot initiatives to implement Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) despite strong majority support from voters under 65. Still, RCV was defended in Alaska, passed by a landslide in Washington, D.C., and has earned majority support in 31 straight pro-RCV city ballot measures. Still, some critics of RCV argue that it does not enhance and promote democratic principles as much as forms of proportional representation (PR), as commonly used throughout Europe and Latin America.

However, in the U.S. many people have not heard of PR. The question under consideration is whether implementing RCV serves as a stepping stone to PR by building public understanding and support for reforms that move away from winner-take-all systems. Utilizing a nationally representative sample of respondents (N=1000) on the 2022 Cooperative Election Survey (CES), results show that individuals who favor RCV often also know about and back PR. When comparing other types of electoral reforms, RCV uniquely transfers into support for PR, in ways that support for nonpartisan redistricting and the national popular vote do not. These findings can inspire efforts that demonstrate how RCV may facilitate the adoption of PR in the U.S.

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Supreme Court
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Gerrymandering and voting rights under review by Supreme Court again

On Dec. 13, The Fulcrum identified the worst examples of congressional gerrymandering currently in use.

In that news report, David Meyers wrote:

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