REDISTRICTING RHODE ISLAND
COUNTY REDISTRICTING PLANS

For the second round of public hearings on Redistricting in Rhode Island, the League was present at the Newport, Kent County, Providence and Bristol County hearings. Patty MacLeish, Marie Hennedy, Jane Rankin, Derry Riding, Susan Escherich, Barbara Feldman, Maureen Romans, Mickie Bonneau and Rosemary Forbes Woodside attended meetings for their respective counties and working meetings of the Commission at the State House.

Unfortunately, the staff has not always had the closeup maps of the house districts available at the county meetings for public input. Many of the maps presented fragmented towns in ways that made little sense in terms of communities of interest or even accessibility. Patty MacLeish testified in Newport, and Marie Hennedy in Kent County. Marie reported that she "testified against splitting East Greenwich into as many as four RI Senatorial districts," which " violated LWVRI principles of geographic contiguity and respect for the boundaries of municipalities, and noted that League Principles prohibit consideration of the political affiliations of registered voters and previous election results."
Read Patty's testimony here.

The League's presence has been noted by the Commission and elected officials. The Commission will hold two more working meetings and take public comment on December 12 and 15, and is scheduled to select a plan on December 19 to forward to the entire Legislature. They will consider it in January.
See the League's position on redistricting.

To look at proposed districts for your county, and to check the schedule, please visit www.riredistricting.com.

"Our View," published in The Newport Daily News, Dec. 14, 2011. Reprinted with permission.

Redrawing of districts lacks logic
Every 10 years, legislative districts are redrawn, ostensibly to reflect changes in census data.

But what ends up happening, especially in Rhode Island, frequently has more to do with politics than statistics.

Of course, this is nothing new - the term "gerrymandering" was coined in the early 1800s, a combination of the last name of the Massachusetts governor in 1812, Elbridge Gerry, and a salamander-shaped district that came to represent the contortion of voting districts to achieve a political goal.

Two hundred years later, the same kind of thing seems to be on the verge of happening in Rhode Island.

The Special Commission on Reapportionment has been holding hearings across the state on various proposals to redraw the state's voting districts for General Assembly and Congress. Each type of legislative district should have roughly the same number of residents - about 14,000 residents for a state House district, for example, and about 526,000 residents for a U.S. House district.

To achieve this, some of the proposals would remove communities from the rest of their county and lump them in with another - in the case of Jamestown, connected by swaths stretching over Narragansett Bay. Others would move three Republican-leaning communities from the First Congressional District into the Second District (remember, there are only two congressional districts in Rhode Island), and put the hometown of a Republican challenger for the First District in the Second District.

This also is nothing new; the Democratic majority in Rhode Island has been known to carve candidates it did not like - even from within the party - out of their districts and create districts containing communities whose only connection was having banks on opposite sides of a river.

These unsightly, nonsensical districts could not have been drawn to give voters the fairest representation; they only could have been drawn to affect a particular outcome in the next election.

Rhode Island could have taken much of the politics - and the cost - out of the redistricting process. Forty-seven other states are taking advantage of free geographic information system software provided by the federal government that can be merged with census data to create the blueprints for new districts.

In a Guest View in The Daily News in April, Margaret Kane, president of Operation Clean Government, urged the General Assembly to reconsider the option.

"Why are we one of only three states to opt out of the process?" she wrote. "Why do we need to hire an outside firm and pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in these very difficult economic times for information and work product that was offered for free?"

Instead, the General Assembly is paying a consultant to draw the new district lines, setting aside $1.5 million for the process. And we're sure legislative leaders want to get what they paid for: Results that benefit their party's candidates and hurt their challengers.

To that end, district lines end up not only dividing counties, but splitting communities and even neighborhoods.

"These divisions of the towns into many parts that do not share contiguous boundaries or common interests and have little respect for the boundaries of municipalities dilute the strength of a citizen's vote in the Statehouse," said Patty MacLeish of Newport, who represented the Newport County branch of the League of Women Voters during a public hearing in Newport earlier this month. "The league would like to see greater respect for municipal boundaries and more consideration of the common interests within the voting districts of Newport County, and in particular, Aquidneck Island."

We couldn't agree more. And yet we couldn't have less hope that actually will happen.

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The League of Women Voters, a nonpartisan political organization, encourages the informed and active participation of citizens in government, works to increase understanding of major public policy issues, and influences public policy through education and advocacy.

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