Statehouse works to redistrict

The Indiana Senate Elections Committee and House Elections and Apportionment Committee heard  testimony Wednesday regarding the redistricting of Indiana’s House, Senate and congressional districts.

Newly proposed district maps were unveiled in the Indiana Senate and House Chambers on Monday.

Chairwoman of the Senate Elections Committee, Sen. Sue Landske, R-Cedar Lake, began the senate committee hearing by explaining the responsibility of the state legislature to redraw districts.

“Almost 47 years ago, Chief Justice Earl Warren identified the goal for any state legislature in drawing voting maps,” Landske said. “He said ‘Whatever the means of accomplishment, the overriding objective must be substantial equality of population among the various districts so that the vote of any citizen is approximately equal in weight to any other citizen in the state.”

A number of 720,422 residents per each of Indiana’s nine congressional districts was determined to satisfy the population equality goal. Population equality, however, is not the only objective in redrawing districts.

Former State Representative William Ruppel, who testified on behalf of the Wabash County Economic Development Corporation and the Citizens Redistricting Commission, explained voters’ redistricting concerns.

“While I went around the state listening to different people talk, they said we wanted districts to be incumbent blind,” Ruppel said. “They wanted them to be as competitive as possible.”

Public input was first considered in late March when legislators visited eight locations throughout the state as they listened to constituents.

The first to testify Wednesday was a DePauw University student. His concern was with counting prisoners in the redistricting population.

“I recommend that prisoners not be counted in the redistricting process because: one, prisoners are disenfranchised; two, their residency is non-voluntary; three, they are not participants in the local economy,” he said. 

A DePauw University professor, who said her students had worked on a redistricting project, suggested specific boundary movements to accommodate districts with a large prisoner population.

“Congressional district number eight has four prisons in it,” she said. “It would be fairly easy to have district number eight go in slightly above Branchville (a sparsely populated area currently located in District 9) and move district number nine 10 miles further to the west.”

Public testimony was also heard in front of the House Elections and Apportionment Committee earlier that day. Both the Senate and House proposals for Indiana’s nine congressional districts are identical.