Retrospective on AIRC Measures and Opportunistic Definitions

Redistricting is done for another decade. Maybe. There will be litigation, and changes could come, but the primary design of Arizona’s Independent Redistricting Commission (AIRC) is complete.

But before this AIRC’s work fades from our memory, we should consider what could be improved for the future. Here, I’ll comment on one aspect of the process: the redistricting criteria specified in the Arizona Constitution. We now have seen how they were used and how they performed.

Federal Criteria

Compliance with the U.S. Constitution and the Voting Rights Act is mandatory. Exactly what this means has been altered by Supreme Court decisions, but no one on the AIRC has argued that they can be ignored.

For Congressional districts, their population count must be equal (within a one-person deviation). There is some wiggle room for legislative districts – previous court decisions suggest that the range from undercount to overcount should lie within 10%.

State Criteria

But for other criteria, interpretation can vary widely. This leaves far too much room for opportunistic definition.

Let’s start with competitiveness. This was based on nine 2016 through 2020 elections. A key measure was chosen to be the average vote spread between the 2 major parties for those elections. Competitiveness was determined by two thresholds: if that spread was 4% or less, the district would be deemed “highly competitive”; if it was between 4 and 7%, it would still be called “competitive.” But a separate standard was the number of these elections that were won by each party. If all nine elections were not carried by a single party, the other party was deemed to have a chance to win another one.

The relative predictive relevance of each election was not incorporated, and there was no definition of how to incorporate the two distinct measures, number-of-wins vs the average vote share. This ambiguity can be used to justify a particular boundary based on any choice of emphasis. It would be better to have a single criterion based on the likelihood of a win given prior elections. And to promote a goal of maximizing competitiveness, as a majority of speakers at public meetings requested.

Another criterion that seemed to have a quantitative definition was compactness. While drawing boundaries to favor a party is the goal of gerrymandering, the most visible evidence for it is a strange, assymetric district shape. There are several common measures of compactness. But the AIRC didn’t pick one; after calculating area and perimeter, five measures derived from them were calculated for each map. While it’s true that some districts cannot be very compact because of large low-population rural areas in Arizona, a clearer standard of compactness would be better. This was glossed over by the AIRC. And the related issue of contiguity was never defined at all.

Geographic features were used to justify boundaries in some instances and ignored in others. This criterion too needed better definition. Does it matter if a mountain range divides a district? Some in the public argued that it was no problem, it was fun driving over the mountains; others said that while certainly not impassable, the greater difficulty of going through the mountain range meant that they typically didn’t go that way. But the ambiguity meant that this criterion could be interpreted opportunistically.

The last criterion to discuss is the much-vaunted “communities of interest” (COI). There is no clear definition for this, so commissioners were free to claim anything to justify their preferred boundaries for each district. We heard Commissioners use shopping centers, vacant lots that might be developed, and even cemeteries to justify boundaries for a COI. A redistricting COI should be a group that has significant needs in common that benefit from legislative representation. Not a shopping center that people drive to.

Ambiguity Baked In

The Arizona Constitution didn’t clearly define these criteria, and the wording of “where to do so would create no significant detriment to other goals” for competitiveness has led to endless arguments about the word “significant.” While subjectivity is inevitable for this process, the degrees of fuzziness in the definitions has provided fertile ground for abuse. Some commissioners took full advantage of this imprecision to make the final maps significantly less competitive and more weighted in the Republican direction than the draft maps; this after 30 days of public hearings in which participants overwhelmingly argued for greater competitiveness and against particularly gerrymandered districts (for instance, LD17 in the Tucson area).

There are times when imprecision and lack of definition can be liberating. This is not one of them.

Nelson Morgan, an Arizona Indivisible Gerrymander Slayer and retired academic researcher, now in Phoenix after 50 years of life in and around Berkeley; is the author of “We Can Fix It: How to Disrupt the impact of Big Money on Politics.”