Voting Rights Roundup: Four states vote on redistricting reforms in November. Here's how they work

Leading Off

● Redistricting Reform: Redistricting reform will be on the ballot in four states this November, following the Missouri Supreme Court’s decision not to hear a GOP-backed appeal seeking to block a state legislative redistricting reform from going before voters. Below, we'll detail just what each proposal entails and its implication for each state.

Colorado (Amendment Y & Amendment Z)

Earlier this year, Colorado's Republican-run state Senate and Democratic-majority state House unanimously referred two state constitutional amendments to the ballot for voter approval: Amendment Y would create a congressional redistricting commission, and Amendment Z would do the same for the state legislature. Currently, congressional redistricting is handled like typical legislation, while legislative redistricting is carried out by a commission where the governor can determine which party effectively holds the majority.​

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​Under these proposals, a panel of three retired appellate judges—one from each major party and one who is unaffiliated—would play a key role in randomly selecting commissioners from a pool of applicants. Democrats, Republicans, and independents would each have four members on the commission, and it would take two votes from each bloc to pass a map. The four legislative party leaders would not get to hand-pick any of the commission’s members, although they do get to select a pool of 10 applicants each to submit to the panel of judges for random selection. Consequently, this arrangement can reasonably be considered independent.

Any adopted maps would also have to follow several strict criteria, which the proposals list as: following federal law; preserving communities of interest (extensively defined by the amendments); keeping cities and counties whole; maximizing compactness; maximizing the number of politically competitive districts; banning the intentional favoring or disfavoring of a party or candidate; and preventing the dilution of the electoral strength of voters belonging to a racial or ethnic minority.

Nonpartisan legislative staff would assist commissioners by preparing preliminary maps, but commissioners could direct them to make changes as they saw fit. If the commission passed a map, the state Supreme Court would review it to determine whether it faithfully complied with the above criteria. If commissioners failed to pass a map, the commission staff would be directed to submit their final plan to the court, which would then review it for compliance with the criteria above.

Both amendments require 55 percent of the vote to pass. These measures would guard against partisan gerrymanders by either side, but they’re more likely to impact Democrats, who are better-positioned than Republicans to have unified control of the state government after 2020.