WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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Redistricting is how congressional and state legislative boundaries are drawn. Five Thirty Eight said in the state of Indiana, there are no competitive districts. This means there isn’t a single district in Indiana where both parties have a 1 in 6 chance of winning a congressional election.
Districts redrawn after the 2020 U.S. Census face another decade of unequal representation.
Linda Hanson, co-president of the League of Women Voters of Indiana, said current redistricting laws are a problem in Indiana.
“Despite the fact that our state constitution says that all power resides with the people, in fact it does not,” she said.
State Senator Mark Stoops (D-Bloomington) co-authored Senate Bill 293, which calls for a transparent push for redistricting laws in Indiana. The bill was given a first reading two weeks ago. It was then referred to the Senate Committee on Elections.
Last year, the Indiana Senate passed Senate Bill 1005, which was supposedly meant to set standards for lawmakers to redraw districts.
Critics of the law such as Common Cause and the League of Women Voters say partisan lawmakers are still redrawing the districts. They argue districts should be redrawn by a bi-partisan independent commission.
Hanson remains hopeful of the transparency bill, but she sees others states where an independent commission redraws district maps. She wonders why Indiana is so far behind.
“It’s not happening in Indiana, because we have that requirement where we have the legislature do everything. The legislature doesn’t want to give up any power for that,” she said.
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Tommi Allison is a chairman on the Redistricting Committee for the League of Women Voters in Monroe County. She explained how gerrymandering works.
“First of all how gerrymandering is done, you pack a whole bunch of your opponent party into a few safe districts,” she said. “The opposition party will win big in those safe districts, but you have other districts where you win a smaller amount.”
“But,” she said, “you win many more districts.”
Tommi Allison explained the tried and true mission statement of the League of Women Voters in Monroe County which said they advocate for empowering voters while defending democracy.
In her area of focus, more specifically, it is to replace gerrymandering with a more transparent process of redrawing legislative districts.
“It is to have fair redistricting,” she said.
Allison said the League of Women Voters pushes for educating the public on redistricting laws. She said current redistricting leads to unfair representation before primary elections even begin.
“You get extremes in both parties,” she said.
Her husband, Jim Allison, serves on the League of Women Voters’ Committee on Redistricting with his wife. He specializes in analytics.
He said after looking at the numbers, he noticed a little more than half of the population elected three-quarters of elected officials in the Hoosier state. He explains further.
“55 percent of the voters elected 78 percent of the House of Representatives” he said.
Jim Allison questioned the constitutionality of the disproportionately-represented districts in Indiana.
“The Supreme Court has declared the constitutionality many times of one-person, one-vote. One-person, one-vote means proportional representation,” he said.
Tommi Allison said democracy cannot function without proportional representation. It means your individual vote matters less in a gerrymandered district. In turn, people are discouraged from voting.
“If you care about any issue at all … then you want you want the legislature to be proportional,” she said.
This Sunday at 3 p.m., the local League of Women Voters chapter will hold an event in the auditorium at the Monroe County Library to educate the public on redistricting.
