Are Pa s state House and Senate maps gerrymandered? Depends on how you measure them pennlive.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from pennlive.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Republican Efforts to Restrict Voting Risk Backfiring on Party Bloomberg 2/16/2021 Ryan Teague Beckwith
(Bloomberg) Republican lawmakers in battleground states are rushing to enact stricter voting laws that Democrats worry could dampen Black and Hispanic turnout, but the moves could end up backfiring because of the changing face of the GOP coalition.
The flurry of legislation includes attempts to impose voter ID requirements and roll back pandemic-related expansion to mail-in access, steps that may inadvertently limit the participation of many of the older, rural and blue-collar voters that Republicans now depend on.
State legislatures across the country are considering more than a hundred bills that would increase voter ID requirements, tighten no-excuse vote-by-mail, and ban ballot drop boxes, among other changes.
How Gerrymandering Will Protect Republicans Who Challenged the Election
Taking a position as inflammatory as refusing to certify a fair election would be riskier for G.O.P. lawmakers if they needed to appeal to an electorate beyond their next set of primary voters.
Representative Jim Jordan and other Republican members on the House floor last week during the vote on impeaching President Trump.Credit.Erin Schaff/The New York Times
Jan. 19, 2021
WASHINGTON Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio comes from a duck-shaped district that stretches across parts of 14 counties and five media markets and would take nearly three hours to drive end to end.
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Clean Missouri, a liberal campaign committee, poured over $7.5 million into defending their 2018 victory. In the end, Amendment 3 passed in November undoing the coalitions’ groundwork in the redistricting fight.
The battle exposed a partisan tug-of-war over control of redistricting, which only occurs every 10 years. Even though redistricting reforms passed with 62% of the vote in 2018, the GOP-controlled legislature challenged the reforms in a new ballot initiative called Amendment 3, which reversed the midterm decision. Clean Missouri continued its coalition building with Black and brown activists at the beginning of the new election cycle.
“It came together from coalitions of Missourians identifying an issue, trying to find solutions, bring people in, and building an organic, people-powered campaign to get something done,” said Yurij Rudensky, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, a nonpartisan law and policy institute.