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NYCLU Testimony Regarding Onondaga County “Redistricting and Destruction, Retrogression and Cracking” of the Minority-Majority predominantly African-American 16th District

The NYCLU, a state affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, is a not-for-profit, nonpartisan organization with eight offices and 160,000 members across the state. Our mission is to defend and promote the fundamental principles and values embodied in the Bill of Rights, the U.S. Constitution, and the New York Constitution, including freedom of speech and religion, and the right to privacy, equality, and due process of law, with particular attention to the pervasive and persistent harms of racism.

The process of redistricting is being unnecessarily and unjustifiably rushed.  This rushed process has lacked transparency and opportunities for meaningful community engagement or public input.  The redistricting commission’s, the Legislature’s, and now the County Executive’s haste to enact a new map has resulted in maps that have raised concerns about racial gerrymandering and continue to raise concerns about racial gerrymandering.  There is no practical or legal reason to pass a redistricting plan before the end of 2021 when the next primary election for the County Legislature will not occur until June 2023.  The implausible explanations for the purported need to pass a map immediately combined with substantive concerns about racial vote dilution raise serious questions about the true motivations behind the rush to pass such a flawed map on a truncated schedule without adequate scrutiny.

A New York state statute signed earlier this year prohibits new maps that “diminish’’ the ability of racial or language minorities “to elect representatives of their choice.”  This law imposes a more stringent non-retrogression standard than imposed by Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which is also applicable to the County Legislature’s redistricting plan.  The proposed map is at risk of violating both state and federal law.  Governments must avoid splitting up – or “cracking’’ — minority-dominated districts to eliminate their majority and diminish their voting power. Governments are also required to avoid concentrating minority residents into fewer districts than necessary – or “packing” – which diminishes the political weight of their representatives.

In a December 9, 2021 letter on the proposed redistricting maps, the County Attorney attempted to justify the latest plans’ decision to reduce the population of the only extant Black-majority district by asserting that the moved was necessary to avoid “packing” Black voters.  However, the County Attorney’s statement fails to address the more obvious problem with the proposed map, i.e., the map “cracks” the only Black-majority district in the County into multiple districts where Black voters have a diminished opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.  The new map’s proponents have not shown that reducing the Black population in the only Black-majority district will not result in “cracking.”  To ensure that a redistricting plan is not “cracking or “packing” Black voters—a qualified expert should analyze the demographics of the proposed districts in the context of racial voting patterns and turnout rates to determine whether those proposed districts will actually not diminish Black voters’ opportunity to participate in the political process and to elect candidates of their choice.  Moreover, those analyses should also be disclosed to the public to ensure confidence in the process and allow for meaningful public engagement.  There is no evidence that the proponents of the new maps have made such efforts to ensure that the redistricting plan will not diminish Black voting strength.  Instead, the proposed maps appear to have simply assumed without analysis that voters of color and white voters turnout at the same rate and that all voters of color have similar voting preferences and can therefore be grouped into coalition districts.

Analyzing racial voting patterns requires sophisticated methods applied by qualified experts, such as Ph. D. political scientists.  These analyses are key to understanding the extent to which voting is racially-polarized and whether and to what extent a particular district will give voters of any racial group an opportunity to elect candidates of choice.  These are time-consuming analyses and the redistricting process should afford adequate time for both the County and for independent analysts to perform them.  However, estimating voter turnout by race is a much less cumbersome process and that analysis exposes some serious flaws in the proposed map and the County Attorney’s claims about avoiding packing.  An analysis of the 2021 elections show that white voters turned out at disproportionately higher rates than Black, Hispanic, or Asian voters, which suggest that a district where the total population is less than 50% Black may not actually perform in a way that allows Black voters an opportunity to elect their candidate of choice.  In fact, the racial disparity in turnout rates for odd-year elections is so great that depending on the extent to which voting is racially-polarized, white voters may actually be the leading voting bloc in proposed district 16, which has less than 50% Black total population.  By contrast, the current map, in which the total population of district 16 is approximately 58% Black, Black voter preferences are more likely to prevail based on turnout rates.

Because of the flawed and opaque process by which they were developed as well as the serious concerns by the demographics of the proposed districts, we urge the County to reject the proposed maps.  Instead, we urge the County start again with a redistricting process that allows adequate time for meaningful community engagement as well as the appropriate expert analyses.  A thorough, transparent, and deliberate process will provide the public with confidence that any proposed maps comply with state and federal law, as well as fundamental principles of fairness and equity.

Testimony provided by David Rufus

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