The Alaska Supreme Court ruled Friday that a new map of state Senate districts for Anchorage “constituted an unconstitutional political gerrymander violating equal protection under the Alaska Constitution” and must be redrawn before its use in this year’s statewide election.
In a combined summary decision, the court said it is upholding a lower court ruling that instructed the state’s five-person redistricting board to redraw the Senate map or explain why it is impossible to do so.
As part of the decision that combined several lawsuits against the redistricting maps, the justices ruled against Skagway, which had argued it belonged in the House district with downtown Juneau, not the Mendenhall Valley. Skagway contended that its tourism-based economy is a better fit with Juneau’s downtown district.
With the ruling, Skagway and Haines will spend the next 10 years in a House district with Juneau’s Mendenhall Valley.
The redistricting board is in charge of redrawing legislative boundaries after every U.S. census to account for changes in population. Alaska’s 20 Senate districts are each made of two House districts.
In November, the board linked Eagle River’s two House districts with two districts elsewhere in Anchorage, rather than combining them to form a single Eagle River Senate seat. This resulted in two Republican-leaning Senate seats greatly influenced by Eagle River voters, and accusations of political gerrymandering levied against the three Republican-appointed members of the redistricting board.
Some East Anchorage residents sued, saying the map illegally diluted their votes. A lower-court judge agreed, and the board asked the high court to review that decision.
“I do think this is a historic moment because we have not had a partisan gerrymandering, equal protection claim succeed in a redistricting case in Alaska,” said attorney Holly Wells, who represented the East Anchorage residents.
There could be ripple effects in Senate districts elsewhere in Anchorage, depending on the board’s next actions.
The deadline for legislative candidates to file for office is June 1, and without final boundaries, candidates cannot know which districts they live in and may represent.
The justices’ decision represented only a summary and said that a longer explanation will be published at a later date.
In February, Anchorage Superior Court Judge Thomas Matthews said there was evidence indicating that redistricting board members Budd Simpson and Bethany Marcum (appointed by Gov. Mike Dunleavy) worked in secret with board chairman John Binkley (appointed by former Senate President Cathy Giessel, an Anchorage Republican) to give Eagle River greater representation in the Senate.
After a monthslong public process that drew the lines for state House districts, the board took only four days to determine the boundaries of the Senate districts, and much of that time was spent in closed-door sessions.
Board members Melanie Bahnke (appointed by former Chief Justice Joel Bolger) and Nicole Borromeo (appointed by then-House Speaker Bryce Edgmon, an independent from Dillingham), were outraged by the process and said it opened the board to accusations of gerrymandering.
In written filings to the Supreme Court, the Alaska Black Caucus, NAACP Anchorage, Korean-American Community of Anchorage, Native Movement and First Alaskans Institute said there were racial impacts.
“Two sets of diverse Anchorage neighborhoods have been joined with significantly whiter, more affluent and more conservative neighborhoods to the north 9eagle River),” they wrote, saying that such treatment violated the equal protection clause of the Alaska Constitution.
Wells did not raise the racial question in oral arguments, and the high court’s ruling does not address those issues, but the justices did find that the Senate map was a violation of the equal protection clause because it did not provide “fair and effective representation — the right to group effectiveness or an equally powerful vote.”
The lower court, and now the high court, have said that gerrymandering did take place and it violated the rules for equal protection.
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