The Arkansas Board of Apportionment today rubberstamped legislative redistricting maps to reflect 2020 Census population changes in a brief meeting in which the all-Republican panel and the Republican-led staff assured the public that the maps were fair and would withstand any legal challenge.

They dismissed criticism of the proposed maps from the ACLU, the Arkansas Public Policy Panel, Indivisible Little Rock and others.

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Governor Hutchinson, chair of the commission, said some substantive changes were made in response to complaints about splitting House districts in Mountain Home, Jonesboro, Fort Smith and Springdale. One change will produce, he said, a majority Hispanic voting-age population in Springdale where the original map had not. The precise boundaries weren’t immediately available and so it’s unclear whether this change ameliorates the gerrymandering that deprived Rep. Megan Godfrey, a Democrat, of a large part of her support in Springdale. A majority voting-age Hispanic population is also not the same thing as a majority Hispanic registered voter population, so further study of this district will be necessary before assessing the outcome. Godfrey won’t be back in any case. She’s announced she will not seek re-election.

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She says the Republian effort to target her succeeded, even with today’s changes.

“A few weeks ago, when the Board of Apportionment released its draft map of new House districts, I joined dozens of people in calling on the board to amend the draft to keep downtown Springdale whole. I was so incredibly encouraged by the outpouring of support and was hopeful that the board would listen to our community’s voices. They didn’t. The partisan and divisive map, finalized today, leaves me in a new district that stretches up into Benton County. That district deserves a different representative who can be a strong advocate for that community and its values, just as I have been a strong advocate for downtown and east Springdale.”

No changes were announced in the gerrymanders intended to reduce Democratic representation in the Jacksonville area and to pack minorities into a district splitting Forrest City and West Memphis, some 40 miles apart. Also unmentioned was a racially oriented split of Magnolia, currently represented by an African-American Democrat.

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Hutchinson said the maps would produce 11 majority Black House districts and four in the Senate. African-Americans make up 16.5 percent of Arkansas population, leaving them underrepresented by five in the 100-member House and at least one in the Senate.

Betty Dickey, the Republican politician who led the redistricting staff, said 2020 redistricting split fewer counties than 2010 redistricting when Democrats held two of the three Board of Apportionment seats. She also said it was superior in other ways in meeting legal guidelines. Attorney General Leslie Rutledge and Secretary of State John Thurston are the other current members of the Board. Governor Beebe and Attorney General Dustin McDaniel outvoted Republican Secretary of State Mark Martin in 2010. The maps undoubtedly were designed to help Democrats, but they failed miserably as the huge Republican majority legislature now demonstrates.

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Dickey contended concerns had been addressed. She answered no questions about criticism leading up to the meeting and only said today that those comments had been made part of the record. Hutchinson made a point of saying the ACLU comments and an alternative map proposal had been made part of the record, if not followed.

The Times’ Austin Bailey covered the meeting and should have more of the post-mortem before long.

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Hutchinson acknowledged not all concerns had been addressed, but the board was constrained by the difficulty of balancing district interests. He said courts might yet review the work and said Dickey might continue to work after Dec. 15 should any further input from the redistricting staff be necessary as a result of court action

Here’s the final Senate map and report.

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Here’s the final House map and report.

 

UPDATE: Reaction came quickly.

The Arkansas Board of Apportionment’s meeting today to finalize state legislative redistricting lines was deeply disappointing. It illustrated why the process needs to be completely reformed.

The Board appears to have made substantive changes in Fort Smith, Springdale and Jonesboro to respond to complaints that these communities were racially gerrymandered. It will take some time to assess the specific demographic changes made by moving these lines. But the Board adopted these changes only minutes after proposing them.

The public had no opportunity to review, assess and comment on the changes. Many Arkansans still have no idea they are divided from their neighbors, and they had no opportunity to provide input to the Board. This is unacceptable for a process so
fundamental to our democracy.
The board should have issued their revisions in advance of the meeting, or delayed the certification vote for a reasonable period of time to allow for independent assessment and comment on the impact of these sudden changes. They should have held public forums in impacted communities across the state after the proposed maps were released and before final adoption. The Board failed.
A few other changes were made, such as the welcome reunification of Mountain Home. It’s critical to point out that hundreds of communities like Mountain Home were needlessly divided for partisan and racial gerrymandering purposes and were not
corrected in the final maps adopted by the Board. Why are citizens in other communities that are cracked apart less worthy of reunification than the residents of Mountain Home?
Throughout this redistricting cycle, the Board’s process of public engagement was severely deficient. Most communities were never informed they were split in the new maps.
We will continue to review the impact of the sudden changes in the maps, but overall our previous assessment remains valid: Communities across Arkansas are unnecessarily split to serve a political outcome. The Board failed to sufficiently inform and engage the public. And the Board ignored most of the rules spelled out in law on how the maps should be drawn.

The Democratic Party also complained and offered some details on how the Republicans gamed the system for partisan gain.

The Arkansas Board of Apportionment rubber stamped newly drawn state House and state Senate maps today following a 30-day public comment period. Governor Asa Hutchinson approved of the new maps, which reduce the number of majority-minority districts from 17 to 14; tamper with the state’s only majority-Latinx district; and fail to take into account officially recorded public comments. The apportionment board utilized well-known racial gerrymandering tactics to draw the lines. These maps are illegal and will be met with challenges in court and a costly legal battle for the state.

“These new maps cheat Arkansas voters, and that’s intentional,” said Democratic Party of Arkansas Chair Grant Tennille. “The maps are a clear example of racial gerrymandering. It’s hard to believe the Governor has the nerve to continue the parade of lies that this is a good thing for minority voters. It’s 2021, and Republican redistricting operatives in Arkansas voted to approve a 17.6 percent decrease in majority-minority districts.”

“They cracked minority populations along the Delta, diluting Black votes and weakening Black incumbents along the Mississippi River and in South Arkansas— while also packing minority populations elsewhere. The board claims to have created the state’s first Latinx district; what they actually did was ignore that Springdale’s currently drawn downtown district has grown into a majority-Latinx district. These newly drawn maps are illegal. The people who drew them know it, and they know they’ll be headed to court.”

“This process was a missed opportunity to start doing things right in Arkansas, to have fairly drawn maps that respect voters and their communities. Instead, we have yet another example of gerrymandering and voter suppression.”

The Board of Apportionment did make some minor changes to the maps, but only to keep white voters and communities intact.

“There’s a reason that people in Mountain Home were heard and got to keep their district together, while people in Magnolia who wanted to keep their district whole were ignored. The Board claims substantial changes were made. We don’t need to pretend that people were heard or listened to in this process, they were not,” said Tennille.

Rep. David Fielding (D-Magnolia), Rep. David Tollett (R-Lexa), Rep. Mark McElroy (R-Tillar) previously represented majority-minority districts. The Districts drawn to represent these areas are not majority-minority districts.
New District 98 (Columbia, Lafayette, Nevada, Ouachita)  – now 48.6 percent minority population
New District 94 (Desha, Drew, Bradley) – now 41.29 percent minority population
New District 95 (Chicot, Ashley) – now 40.9 percent minority population
The overall share of Democratic voters in Arkansas based on recent elections is approximately 35 percent. The newly drawn legislative districts only account for about 20 percent Democratic representation.

 

Then came another blast from groups that had offered comments that were spurned.

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Indivisible Little Rock and Central Arkansas and Arkansans for a Unified Natural State (AFUNS) opposed today’s vote by the Arkansas Board of Apportionment to approve newly created state House and Senate districts. In reviewing the draft maps proposed in October, Indivisible and AFUNS found that the Board disregarded its own publicly stated criteria, by drawing new districts that divide dozens of Arkansas cities and towns, and by diluting non-white electoral power by splitting communities of interest.

 

Violating redistricting coordinator Justice Betty Dickey’s promises of transparency, the Board voted today on final maps that were altered from the draft maps — but were not made public until the Board’s vote to approve them. The final maps dilute the voting power of minority communities across Arkansas, by splitting small cities such as Forrest City, West Memphis, Magnolia, Jonesboro, Jacksonville and others. These lines were drawn in a manner that both cracked and packed Black and Hispanic communities, in violation of the federal Voting Rights Act.

Despite more than 800 public statements sent to the Board from citizens and organizations throughout Arkansas, an overwhelming majority of which disapproved of the first set of maps because of the unnecessary splits that appear to have significantly influenced race and partisan interests, Governor Asa Hutchinson, Attorney General Leslie Rutledge and Secretary of State John Thurston, all voted to approve the unpublicized maps that, according to Gov. Hutchinson, only incorporated the concerns of six communities.

One of those hundreds of ignored public comments was a 45-page detailed report published by the Arkansas Public Policy Panel that meticulously highlighted each and every one of the splits with recommendations on how to resolve them.

“Redistricting is a foundational voting right upon which all other voting rights rest.  It is therefore imperative that we get this right,” said redistricting cartographer Kwami Abdul-Bey, founder of Arkansans for a Unified Natural State, “Sadly, Arkansas’ flawed process of having a highly partisan, highly political body that totally lacks any significant diversity to even want to listen to, and understand, the concerns of the hundreds of citizens that spoke out against the first set of maps is, in and of itself, undemocratic.  This calls for a constitutional referendum that will create a completely independent, non-partisan, non-political body to redraw those maps as soon as is practical.”

Abdul-Bey has spent this year training individuals, groups, and organizations throughout Arkansas who are concerned about redistricting.  His dozens of virtual interactive workshops taught how the process works and how citizens can actively participate.

The Board of Apportionment largely disregarded its own publicly stated criteria, including:

  • to minimize the splitting of political subdivisions, cities and towns across Arkansas

  • to protect “communities of interest”

  • to limit redrawing boundaries based on race

  • to minimize partisan influence

For example, the approved House maps have unnecessarily divided Jacksonville into three districts. Since the ideal House district size apportions around 30,000 voters, and the city of Jacksonville has 29,500 residents, it was possible to draw a district which did not split up the Jacksonville community at all. However, the Board carved out a large group of the city’s Black voters and placed them into with other high-minority precincts in proposed District 66, which snakes down the east side of Pulaski County. This is an example of “cracking” minority voters who make up a common community of interest, and “packing” them together with other minority voters, in order to reduce the number of districts in which the minority voters will have influence. It also echoes the splitting up of Black voting communities when the Arkansas legislature approved new Congressional maps in October that divided the densely non-white population of southern and eastern Pulaski County into three separate Congressional districts, including some of those same Jacksonville voters.

The small town of Magnolia was also unnecessarily divided, in such a way as to reduce the percentage of Black voters in House District 98 and diluting the Black vote. High minority precincts in Forrest City and West Memphis — 39 miles apart — were also carved away from their communities and both placed in House District 63, packing together minority voters into a single district.

The maps as a whole do not proportionally reflect the diversity of Arkansans. According to 2020 census data, Black Arkansans make up 16.5% of the state’s population. But only 11% of both the House and the Senate districts have been drawn as majority-Black. That means this population of Arkansans will be underrepresented in the state legislature, while allowing for over-representation of Arkansas’ White population.

“High-minority precincts were placed in new House districts in a way that results in greater partisan advantage for Republican party candidates,” said Indivisible LRCA’s lead organizer Loriee Evans. “Seventy House districts currently favor GOP candidates; that number rises to 74 under the new maps. Only 11 or 12 districts will now be competitive, down from 17. Out of 100. Think about it. These map boundaries now make it harder for millions of ordinary Arkansans, like those who aren’t White, or those who don’t consider themselves Republican, to elect candidates of their own choosing.”

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