News Clips

Suzanne Almeida of Common Cause, a frequent litigant opposing gerrymanders, noted that courts in Republican states like Ohio have joined ones in deep Democratic states like New York in striking down partisan maps. “If I ran the world,” Almeida said, there’d be national standards against gerrymandering to ensure skewed maps in one big state don’t tilt the entire congressional map. But a Democratic proposal for just that foundered in Congress earlier this year. So, Almeida said, ”we are taking the wins that we can take.”

“We see some of the most bare-knuckled fights over political power at the local level,” said Kathay Feng, the national redistricting director of Common Cause, a government watchdog organization. “Plenty of people have tried creatively to get their way with the commission,” in California, Feng said. “But selecting a group of people who are savvy and listening for exactly that kind of thing makes them well inoculated to those lobbying efforts.”

“They’re lying, and they know we know they’re lying,” says Catherine Turcer, executive director of Common Cause Ohio, one of several non-partisan groups fighting for redistricting reform. Following the April 4 contempt hearing in the Ohio Supreme Court, Mia Lewis, associate director of Common Cause Ohio, told Spectrum News that the Republican strategy for the last year has been to run out the clock. “They said, ‘Oh, it was impossible to meet that (court) deadline.’ Well, yes, if you’re trying to make it impossible by stalling and wasting time.”

"By inserting himself into the map-drawing process in this inappropriate and unprecedented way, Governor DeSantis began to diminish the prospect that the Legislature would timely pass a legally- and constitutionally-compliant congressional map," reads the lawsuit filed by Common Cause Florida and Fair Districts Now.

“There’s a lot that’s just not being said,” said Joanne Antoine, executive director of Common Cause Maryland, a nonpartisan group that focuses on government accountability. “When we talk about politics getting ugly, I think redistricting is at the center of all of it.” ... Common Cause’s Antoine said redistricting presents a bad look for the state. “Voters have no reason to trust the redistricting process. The process is riddled with problems,” she said. “We continue to punt to this idea of a national solution. Unfortunately, it has not come.”

Common Cause Florida, FairDistricts Now and five individual voters filed a motion late Tuesday asking 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Allen Winsor to recuse himself from the lawsuit the groups filed March 11, asking the federal court to set the new congressional districts. Winsor, who was appointed to the federal bench by former President Donald Trump, is one of three judges named by Chief Judge William Pryor to a panel to handle the case. Also on the panel is U.S. District Judge M. Casey Rodgers, a George W. Bush appointee, and U.S. District Judge Adalberto Jordan, a Barack Obama appointee. “Irrespective of his ability to remain evenhanded, Judge Winsor’s extensive advocacy and litigation efforts in Florida’s last redistricting cycle on behalf of the Florida House of Representatives ... raise legitimate questions about his role in deciding Florida’s congressional district plans in this redistricting cycle,’’ the motion states. ... “Judge Winsor’s work as the longstanding Florida House’s legal counsel, and his efforts to defeat those redistricting standards, would make it difficult for an informed lay observer to have confidence in his fair resolution of this matter,’’ they said.