Missouri Republicans on the verge of gutting gerrymandering reform

In the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, Missouri Republicans are seeking to undo a recent effort to make electoral districts in the state legislature more fair.

Lawmakers are trying to gut a referendum voters embraced in 2018 that sought to prevent excessive gerrymandering, a process of manipulating electoral maps that Republicans have used to gain advantages throughout the country this decade. The 2018 measure, approved by 62% of Missouri voters, put a non-partisan demographer in charge of drawing districts, limiting partisan influence on the process. It also makes partisan fairness one of the top criteria the mapmaker must follow. It would likely weaken Republican control of the legislature, according to an Associated Press analysis.

Now, Republicans are on the verge of sending a new ballot proposal to voters that would undo those protections. Their plan would eliminate the non-partisan demographer and return redistricting power to committees nominated by the political parties and selected by the governor. It makes partisan fairness the least important criteria to follow when drawing maps, instead prioritizing keeping communities compact. The proposal also makes it harder to get a gerrymandered map struck down in court.

“The substance of what they’re trying to do has already been outrageous, and it’s incredible that they’re trying to move this attempt to overturn the will of the voters, when voters literally can’t participate in the process,” said Sean Soendker Nicholson, the campaign manager for Clean Missouri, the group behind the gerrymandering reform measure.

The measure has already passed the state senate, and is awaiting a vote in the full House. If approved by 15 May, voters across the state would then choose whether to support it later this year. It is likely the last chance Republicans, who control the state legislature, have to undo the referendum before the once-a-decade redistricting takes place in 2021.

If Republicans succeed, advocates worry it could serve as a model for weakening gerrymandering reform elsewhere. Voters in Michigan, Colorado and Utah all used ballot measures to pass gerrymandering reform in 2018.

“If this moves forward in Missouri, we are a testing ground for them to be able to implement these systems elsewhere,” said Peter Merideth, a Democrat who represents St Louis in the state house.

There is also deep concern the Republican proposal will open the door to redistricting in a way that will disadvantage minorities and non-citizens.

US districts must have roughly the same number of people in them, and states have long used the total population as the basis for drawing them. But the new proposal says the lines should be drawn on the basis of “one person, one vote”.

Voting advocates said this language could allow Missouri Republicans to draw districts based only on those eligible to vote – US citizens aged 18 and over. It’s a standard Republicans have been pushing for, and one that would likely advantage white rural areas and hurt cities, where there are more likely to be non-citizens. Thomas Hofeller, the late Republican redistricting guru, wrote in 2015 that the change would be “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites”.

Dan Hegeman, the Republican state senator sponsoring the measure, struggled to explain why the change was necessary in April. After repeating that it would prevent “illegals” from being counted, Hegeman then said it would prevent “non-Missouri citizens” from being counted. It’s unclear what Hegeman was referring to – to vote in Missouri one only needs to be a US citizen of voting age who is a resident of the state.

The language in the Republican proposal is “a little odd” and “disingenuous at best,” said Yurij Rudensky, redistricting counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice. Missouri, he said, has long based representation on the total population, not just those eligible to vote.

“This is another example of a change that sets the redistricting process up to fail and to make it a mess,” he said. “And to potentially set up for a discriminatory scheme that disadvantages communities of color and would cut out certain constituencies out of the political calculus.”

Republicans have tried to undo the measure since 2018, but their effort last year failed. Some activists believe national Republicans are involved. Hofeller, who died in 2018, worked on Missouri’s maps and was the only defense witness they called in a 2012 challenge to the state’s congressional districts. Dale Oldham, a top Republican redistricting consultant and Hofeller’s longtime business partner, and Adam Kincaid, who leads the National Republican Redistricting Trust, met with the Missouri senate president in April 2019, according to a calendar invitation obtained by Clean Missouri and provided to the Guardian.

Edward Greim, a Kansas City attorney who challenged the Missouri measure in 2018, defended the Republican effort. The measure, he said, was confusing to voters because it lumped gerrymandering and ethics reforms together.

“It is completely wrong and misguided to claim that people are disagreeing with the will of the voters by actually trying to give the voters a chance to consider the redistricting provision on its own merits instead of being lumped in with several other things,” he said.

Greim, who offered advice and some legislative language to Republican lawmakers for last year’s provision, dismissed the suggestion that it was controversial to amend the state constitution to require “one person, one vote” as the standard for redistricting. He noted that this standard was already recognized nationally. In 2016, he said, the US supreme court ruled the standard did not require states to draw districts based only on those who can vote. It left the door open, however, for a future case on whether states could choose to do so.

Putting aside the Republican proposal, Merideth said he couldn’t believe lawmakers were debating gerrymandering in the middle of a pandemic. The state has more than 9,844 reported cases of Covid-19 and 482 deaths.

“It’s completely offensive,” he said. “They clearly decided to make one of their top priorities protecting their ability to gerrymander.”