Voting rights legislation in Congress would have flagged New Jersey’s new congressional map as being unfairly one-sided, even though the district lines were drawn by an independent commission.
The new map, which is being challenged by New Jersey Republicans, shored up three of the four potentially competitive districts now held by Democrats, while making the fourth one more Republican, the 7th District currently represented by Rep. Tom Malinowski. Democrats currently hold 10 of the state’s 12 U.S. House seats.
A report by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice said the new lines resulted in a partisan gerrymander as egregious as those approved by state legislatures dominated by one party, based on criteria established in the voting rights legislation that passed the Democratic-controlled House on a party-line vote but was filibustered by Senate Republicans.
“It turns out the Democratic proposal, at least according to the standards advanced in Congress, would have been flagged as a partisan gerrymander,” said Michael Li, a senior counsel with the Brennan Center and a co-author of the report.
Rutgers University political science professor Ross Baker questioned the findings.
“It’s crying wolf when there’s no wolf,” Baker said. “You only need to look at the 7th Congressional District to understand. This was a seat Malinwoski won and clearly it has mutated to a much more competitive district. That’s the one significant change in the whole map and its pro-Republican.”
Doug Steinhardt, chair of the commission’s Republican delegation, called the map ”a terrible disservice to the people of New Jersey.”
“People in this state deserve the ability to influence the outcomes of their elections and hold their representatives accountable,” he said.
The Democratic delegation chair, Janice Fuller, did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment.
The provisions of the voting rights legislation, named for the late congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis, included a ban on districts “drawn with the intent or have the effect of materially favoring or disfavoring any political party.”
The bill said it would measure such partisan gerrymandering by using a formula based on the last four federal election results in each state.
Under that provision, the New Jersey map should have had three competitive districts, not the one it created, Li said.
Those three districts plus the two safe GOP seats in the new map would give the Republicans a chance to win five of the 12 House seats, or around 42%. The Republicans’ 2020 presidential nominee, Donald Trump, received 41% of the vote. The party’s 2018 U.S. Senate nominee, Bob Hugin, won 43%.
Under the proposed federal law, voters would be able challenge a state’s congressional district map in federal court on the grounds that it does not meet that criteria.
Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight also flagged the New Jersey map as having “a strong pro-Democratic bias.”
New Jersey gives a single member the power to unilaterally decide which congressional map will be used for the next decade. The 13th member of the panel, retired state Supreme Court Justice John Wallace Jr., cast the tiebreaking vote in favor of the map proposed by the Democratic commissioners.
Most other commissions require a buy-in from representatives of both parties, Li said.
“You can pass a map without any Republican votes or without any Democratic votes,” he said. “It’s winner-take-all kind of system if you can persuade the tiebreaker.”
Even so, both parties still have say in drawing the districts, said Ben Dworkin, director of Rowan University’s Institute for Public Policy and Citizenship.
“New Jersey’s process is not nearly as egregious in its partisanship than other states because both parties, regardless of their numerical strength in the legislature or control of the governor’s office, are represented on the commission,” Dworkin said.
“There will always be critics of the New Jersey system because it is a political process but how political really depends on the 13th member and how he or she wants to conduct their work.”
Wallace said that both party maps met his criteria, but he picked the Democratic proposal because the state had operated under Republican-drawn lines for the previous 10 years. He later elaborated on his decision, saying the Democratic map was fairer.
The Republican commissioners sued to overturn the map, saying Wallace used “an arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable vote and reasoning” Democrats asked the court to throw out the suit, calling it “absolutely meritless and based solely on partisan hyperbole.”
Both sides are waiting a decision from the state Supreme Court.
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Jonathan D. Salant may be reached at jsalant@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him at @JDSalant.
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