Surprised they cleared the hurdle.
Yeah at first it seemed confusing to have the 1st take in Lawrence but it really makes sense on second go. Taking in Wyandotte means you have to take in 250k non rural areas if you include Leavenworth county. Lawrence is a much smaller 90k. Taking in 250k non rural areas means you to persuade like 11 or 12 state reps in Western Kansas. Taking in Lawrence just means 3 or 4 have to be done. Well crafted gerrymander considering the various parochial interests of Kansas representatives. Likely all for naught in the end.
What would be the grounds for the court to toss the Pubmander?
Similar to North Carolina, Kansas has provisions establishing equal protection, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, etc. which if you strech you could see how that would justify striking down a partisan gerrymander.
Thanks. And why does one assume the KS high court is as activist and partisan as the NC high court?
I just googled it and it seems that NYS also has an equal protection clause. How interesting.
https://law.justia.com/constitution/new-york/article-i/section-11/
The takeaway from this is that state high courts are going hard partisan (or making it more obvious) and damaging their reputations. And that is a more worrisome development than the most outrageous of gerrymanders. When courts go down the drain, we don't have much left.
Or maybe it's becoming an established judicial precedent nationally that elections should not be manipulated by legislator's map drawing and people deserve elections that are free from such taint.
lol we all know if these maps were drawn by Democrats, liberal state courts wouldn't strike them down.(I do believe liberals on SCOTUS are consistent just like conservatives and would strike them down)
PA's opinion even cited computer simulations as the key proof of the 2010 map being a gerrymander but under the same simulations their final map in 2018 was nearly just an extreme of a gerrymander albeit in the opposite direction. So what exactly is their standard of a gerrymander? Yes PA's 2018 map isn't actually as much of a gerrymander as the 2010 map but by their own standard they did not strike down gerrymandering but instead replaced an extreme gerrymander with a milder one in the opposite direction.
I think this is incorrect? The MGGG report submitted to them at least showed the original (and new proposed) legislature maps were several standard deviations (like 2-3) away from ‘similar maps’. They don’t have the new maps on their 2018 report but I remember going to a talk by Moon Duchin in 2018 or 19 where she talked about it. I thought it came out to something like 1 standard deviation favoring Dems, maybe 1.5? Still not unbiased but statistically it’s way better than the old plan. (Ofc by far the fairest plan proposed under their analysis was Wolf’s plan which came out to favor GOP by less than one SD).
