Alaska Redistricting Board unanimously approves court-ordered fix for 2022 election map
Off to the June 1 candidate filing deadline.
Off to the June 1 candidate filing deadline.
The Alaska Supreme Court didn’t need to hear oral arguments in the Alaska Redistricting Board’s second appearance before them to find the board “again engaged in unconstitutional political gerrymandering to increase one group’s voting power at the expense of others.”
The party-line votes weren’t at all surprising, but what was surprising was the amount of dirty laundry that members Borromeo and Bahnke aired against their conservative colleagues.
Borromeo takes aim at the board’s Litigation Committee and board counsel Matt Singer, arguing they were only supposed to handle day-to-day business and were “not intended to usurp the board’s governance powers.”
The ruling came down to the board’s decision to treat the JBER/Eagle River Senate district as sacrosanct simply because they believed both were conservative.
“The new question for the court to answer is does remand cure a gerrymander?” asked Eva Gardner, the attorney for the Girdwood plaintiffs. “Could a board launder its illegitimate business through the courts? The answer has to be no.”
Girdwood plaintiffs: ‘These board members do not deserve the benefit of the doubt’
With the candidate filing deadline just a month and change away, the judge overseeing the legal battles over Alaska’s redistricting plan has shortened the window for new legal challenges in hopes to settle issues before then.
The Alaska Redistricting saga continued today as Judge Matthews heard competing arguments about what Judge Matthews really meant when he sent the board back to the table to fix its gerrymander. (Screenshot taken with court approval.)
The plan would keep Eagle River in control of two Senate districts while also lumping together several incumbents and a former Senate President together in a single senate district.