(C) Pennsylvania Capital-Star
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How anti-gerrymandering activists could benefit Pa. Republicans and vice versa • Pennsylvania Capital-Star [1]
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Date: 2025-07-24 09:19:51+00:00
Could there ever be a moment in which the interests of political party leaders and government reform advocates come into alignment?
In November, we may get a glimpse of what such a moment would look like, after the results of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court retention elections are known.
This unlikely turn of events might appear to be more plausible at that time, in light of the Supreme Court’s critical role in legislative reapportionment. That’s the process by which states draw new legislative district boundaries after each decennial census in order to produce a state map with a roughly equal number of voters in every district.
When a district has gained population since the most recent census (think Cumberland County, which added an estimated 10,480 residents between 2020 and 2023) or lost population during those years (think Forest County, which shrank by an estimated 509 residents during that period), legislative maps need to be reconfigured in order to make district population totals more or less comparable.
That’s the point at which opportunities for gerrymandering — manipulating district boundaries in ways that will favor a particular political party — come into play. In 2018, Pennsylvania gained unwelcome national recognition for a congressional map in which a particular district, bizarrely redrawn to maximize the number of voters favoring the majority party, produced an image resembling “Goofy kicking Donald Duck.”
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When elected officials get involved in the redistricting process, the results are going to get skewed in this way, producing a majority-party advantage in future legislative elections for a decade. With the aid of mapping software, it’s now possible to generate maps with a strong partisan bias that technically comply with statutory requirements.
That’s what happened in 2018, when Democratic candidates won only 92 of the 203 seats available in the Pennsylvania House elections (45 percent), despite having earned 54 percent of the total popular vote in these elections.
Pennsylvania’s redistricting approach is different from that of most other states. The process is governed by a five-member legislative reapportionment commission, consisting of two representatives from each party (the majority and minority leaders of the state House and Senate), plus a fifth member appointed by the other four individuals.
If these four are unable to agree on who should be chosen as the fifth member, then the state Supreme Court makes the call. That’s what happened at the start of the 2021 redistricting process, with the selection of Mark Nordenberg, Chancellor Emeritus of the University of Pittsburgh, as chair.
Like the U.S. Supreme Court, the state Supreme Court is expected to conduct its business in a nonpartisan manner. However if Democrats continue to constitute a majority of the justices sitting on the state Supreme Court, it’s not unreasonable to expect that the next redistricting process might tend to favor Democrats. That could be the case with a Supreme Court appointment of the fifth LRC member (assuming that the three incumbent justices on the court receive yes votes in the November retention election).
Some Democratic politicians might welcome an opportunity to produce their party’s version of the 2018 GOP-leaning map, in order to redraw district boundaries in a way that complies with the rules, while locking in a Democratic Party advantage in legislative races over the next decade.
After laboring under the burden of GOP-majority dominance for years, some politicians might feel more inclined to support a Democratic-leaning redistricting plan, rather than a more equitable one that would be responsive to the interests of Pennsylvania voters as a whole.
One alternative to this unnecessarily divisive approach: follow the example of Colorado and Michigan, where redistricting is handled by an independent citizens commission that conducts public hearings, shares information about alternative redistricting proposals, and produces district maps based on clear, measurable standards.
In Pennsylvania, this approach and associated authorizing legislation (House Bill 31 and Senate Bill 131) are being supported by Fair Districts PA, a nonpartisan, statewide organization, and other anti-gerrymandering groups. [Disclosure: I’m an active Fair Districts PA volunteer. The views expressed here are mine alone].
The most recent Pennsylvania redistricting, conducted In 2021, produced a map that is consistent with these criteria in important respects, as Nordenberg explained in his final report. Although he was a widely respected LRC chair who conducted the commission’s proceedings in an evenhanded manner, the identity of the next LRC chair won’t be known anytime soon.
Finding a chair with credentials comparable to Nordenberg’s could be extraordinarily difficult in Pennsylvania’s 2031 political environment, which may not be any less turbulent than today’s.
So if it turns out that Democratic justices retain their majority on the Supreme Court in November, what alternative would Republican leaders prefer: a redistricting process strongly influenced by the majority party that produces a legislative map favoring that party? Or a redistricting approach managed by a group of citizens committed to conducting an open process and achieving results that are beneficial to all Pennsylvanians?
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