Author Archives: Dick Hall-Sizemore

by Dick Hall-Sizemore

The redistricting process has broken down here on the eve of the deadline of the Virginia Redistricting Commission to report to the General Assembly.

The divisions and distrust are so deep that the members could not agree even on which maps to use as a starting point in session on Friday.

When the Commission last met last Saturday, it ended the day with Republican- and Democratic-drawn maps for both the House of Delegates and Senate. During the first part of this week, it conducted eight virtual public hearings. The goal for today was to adopt one map for each house to report to the General Assembly by the deadline on Monday. Continue reading →

by Dick Hall-Sizemore

The Virginia Redistricting Commission started its meeting on Saturday with the goal of reaching a preliminary agreement on one draft map for the House of Delegates and one draft map for the Senate in anticipation of public hearings scheduled to begin on Monday. Six hours later, the meeting was adjourned with the members at a near impasse.  There was no “integrated” map for either house and the members had trouble agreeing on how to proceed to the public hearings.

Continuing the approach they had been using in the past, there was a House map developed by the Republican map drawer and one by the Democratic map drawer, each incorporating changes suggested by the Commission members in earlier meetings. During their review, they made some progress, even tweaking some lines in the Lynchburg area and some involving Pittsylvania, Henry, Patrick, and Floyd counties.  The problems arose when they began considering Hampton Roads and the Richmond area. Continue reading →

by Dick Hall-Sizemore

The most recent meeting of the Virginia Redistricting Commission was marked by tension over the two most sensitive issues—incumbency and race. The meeting was supposed to be dedicated to viewing efforts of the two sets of partisan map drawers to come up with a single map for the Senate districts upon which they could agree. Instead, it was spent largely going over ground that had not been resolved regarding the development of majority-minority districts.

Mackenzie Babichenko, the co-chair whose turn it was to preside, started off the meeting by announcing that, in compliance with the statutory requirement of “political fairness,” incumbent addresses had been released to the map drawers. She went on to say that the map drawers had been advised that they could consider the data in drawing districts, but political fairness should have the lowest priority of the various criteria they had been given to consider. Continue reading →

Sen. Steve Newman (R-Lynchburg) Photo Credit: Bob Brown/Times Dispatch

by Dick Hall-Sizemore

Sen. Steve Newman (R-Lynchburg) has resigned from the Virginia Redistricting Commission. He was one of two Republican Senators appointed to the Commission.

Newman did not give any reasons for his decision. However, it is difficult to think it was not out of personal pique at the turn the decision process has taken. As I detailed in my last post, the bipartisan co-chairs announced in their August 23 meeting a policy forbidding individual commissioners from communicating with the Commission’s partisan attorneys and map drawers outside of a public meeting or without all the members being aware of the communication and any questions and of the response. This policy largely negates the decisions previously made by the Commission and vigorously pushed by Newman: two sets of partisan attorneys, two sets of map drawers, consideration of political data, and consideration of incumbents’ addresses. Newman was the most outspoken member opposed to the new protocol. The recent revealing by the map drawers of proposed Senate districts for Northern Virginia must have been the last straw. They were developed without taking incumbents’ addresses into consideration. Any attempted tinkering with those boundaries will have to occur in public session, presumably subject to a series of votes. Continue reading →

by Dick Hall-Sizemore

(Author’s note: The following is the first of several articles on the redistricting process that is underway in the Commonwealth. There is a lot going on that merits discussion, but it is my sense that relatively short articles, as opposed to long ones with lots of detail, are more appropriate for the blog.  The reporting and comments are based on numerous reports, with links at the end of the articles, as well as on hours of listening to, and watching, the recorded meetings of the full commission and one of its subcommittees.)

The Virginia Redistricting Commission has been preparing since January to draw the Commonwealth’s new Congressional districts, as well as the districts for the state Senate and House of Delegates. I wish that I could say “I told you so,” but it is worse than I feared.

A quick background summary would probably be helpful in refreshing everyone’s minds For many years, Republicans in the General Assembly had resisted calls to hand redistricting over to a nonpartisan commission. Then, in the 2017 elections, they lost 15 seats in the House of Delegates, shrinking their previous 32-seat margin to two seats (and one of those they got literally through the luck of the draw). Sensing the likelihood of additional losses in 2019 and thereby putting Democrats in control of redistricting in 2021 and being able to do to them what they had done to Democrats in 2001 and 2011, Republicans proposed a constitutional amendment in the 2019 Session that turned redistricting over to a commission. The amendment passed the 2019 General Assembly with a lot of Democratic support (the vote in the House on the final bill was 83-15). Continue reading →