The Florida Supreme Court has ordered state lawmakers to redraw several of the state's U.S. Congressional district boundaries in ways that don't explicitly favor one party over another.
A strong majority of Florida voters in 2010 passed an amendment to the state constitution asking that districts be drawn in ways that accurately reflect a local population and aren't deliberately skewed, a process known as gerrymandering.
Naturally, in 2012, when lawmakers redrew Florida's U.S. Congressional and State Senate district boundaries, this went unheeded.
By law, the state has to redraw those districts every 10 years, but even with a clear voter mandate to do so fairly, legislators did the business-as-usual thing, this time deleting even more emails than usual. Democratic neighborhoods were lopped out of potential swing districts and put into solidly Dem districts, for example, making for some weird and certainly not contiguous shapes. One Jacksonville area district looks like a crapping caterpillar with an arched back trying to laser a tiny dragon.
Tampa Bay Times reporter Mary Ellen Klaas writes that some of the oddly shaped districts had nicknames corresponding with their odd shapes.
GOP political consultant Frank Terraferma and other political operatives testified how proposed maps with shadowy names such as "Sputnik," "Schmedloff" and "Frankenstein" were created and then secretly shared during the months legislative staff were also drawing maps.
When supporters of, like, democracy saw the maps, they sued, naturally.
Now, nearly three years later, the court is agreeing with the plaintiffs, which include the League of Women Voters, and is making state lawmakers redraw at least eight Congressional districts.
From the News Service of Florida:
The order will require the Legislature "on an expedited basis" to redraw congressional districts represented by Corrine Brown, David Jolly, Kathy Castor, Ted Deutch, Lois Frankel, Mario Diaz-Balart, Carlos Curbelo and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. The order also could affect neighboring districts.
Lawmakers will now have to hold a special session wherein those districts will need to get redrawn — this time, in a way that's transparent and clearly doesn't favor one party over another — before the 2016 presidential election.
Two of those districts, those of Jolly and Castor, are in Tampa Bay. The southern part of Jolly's district, predominantly African-American and Democrat-leaning south St. Pete, was put into Castor's solidly Democrat, mostly-Tampa district in 2012, and its northern boundary was extended into parts of north Pinellas, a reliably Republican area.
Jolly won his seat in 2014 in a special election that followed the death of popular GOP Congressman Bill Young, who occupied the seat for four decades before his death in late 2013.
In that special election, he won his seat by about a point and a half against Democrat Alex Sink. Had that district had its old boundaries, that election probably wouldn't have shaken out that way.
Needless to say, Jolly, Castor and the other incumbents will all have a lot more work on their hands than they may have expected in the lead-up to 2016.
A lawsuit over Florida's State Senate districts is pending.
