Pa. senator believes ‘draft-style’ redistricting could be model for nation

(The Center Square) – When redistricting time arrives, the parties flip a coin and the winner picks one district and redraws it – then the other party picks a different district and redraws it – and then the first party goes again.And so on, until the whole process is done.
That’s the essence of a new proposal from Pennsylvania Sen. Dan Laughlin to resolve the seemingly endless fights over redistricting – like this week’s blowup in Virginia. That situation was in the back of Laughlin’s mind as he issued a co-sponsor memo in the Legislature this week.
“I don’t think any of these states redistricting out of cycle is good for America,” Laughlin.
His idea for change, he said, would be carried out via a constitutional amendment. His gut sense that “draft-style” map-drawing could work is strong enough that he believes “Pennsylvania could be a model for the nation on how to have fair maps.”
On Tuesday, Virginia voters approved a constitutional amendment that could reshape the state’s congressional map ahead of the November election, while setting up a continued legal fight now before the state Supreme Court. It was the latest redistricting showdown at the national level since President Donald Trump’s administration asked Texas last year to create a new plan.
Laughlin’s experience is at the state level, where the arrival of new census data every ten years feeds a process of redrawing state House and Senate districts. The process is rife with partisan accusations, grandstanding, and lawsuits.
In 2022, the last year in which the Pennsylvania Legislative Reapportionment Commission worked out new maps, its final vote came only 11 days before candidates were to start getting signatures on petitions that would nominate them for election to the districts drawn on the maps.
There was mixed reaction even within parties. Democratic Rep. Mike Schlossberg applauded the House map and Democratic Sen. Lisa Boscola called the Senate map “disgraceful.”
After delays for court challenges, the state Supreme Court ultimately set an 11-day window for circulating petitions, half the usual length of time.
In his memo this week, Laughlin wrote that “every ten years, the process devolves into partisan conflict, accusations of gerrymandering, and costly litigation.
Many proposals for change have involved independent commissions. In Laughlin’s opinion, though, “I don’t think you can find anyone who is not partisan, in one way or another.”
A longtime major voice in Pennsylvania’s redistricting debate, David Thornburgh, had a number of questions on Laughlin’s idea.
Thornburgh, who was chairman of the Pennsylvania Redistricting Reform Commission appointed by then-Gov. Tom Wolf in 2018, credited Laughlin with a “creative idea.” At the same time, he wondered what would happen toward the end of a process where the two parties went back and forth drawing individual districts.
He speculated that “there would be territories left” that had gone unwanted through much of the process, and at the end would be melded into strangely shaped leftover districts.
“These maps could get really bizarre,” Thornburgh said.
He wondered how much citizen engagement the process would entail. Another concern, he said, was the role of the independent voter.
Thornburgh said recent polling shows that 45% of all adults nationally consider themselves “independent,” an all-time high, while the concept proposed by Laughlin appears to put all the weight with the two main parties.

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