Gov. Braun calls special session on redistricting, state lawmakers react

SOUTH BEND, Ind.-- Indiana Governor Mike Braun called a special session next week to consider a plan to redraw congressional districts in the state.

Braun said in part quote:

“I am calling a special legislative session to protect Hoosiers from efforts in other states that seek to diminish their voice in Washington and ensure their representation in Congress is fair.”

Braun also mentioned in the announcement that an issue regarding federal and state tax compliance would also be addressed.

This comes after months of pressure from the Trump administration urging multiple states to redistrict to help republicans gain seats in Congress during next year's midterm elections.

ABC57 reached out to multiple state lawmakers, both democrats and republicans, to hear their stance on redistricting. Most did not respond, however, some issued statements, which you can find here.

ABC57 did speak with state representative Randy Novak, a democrat representing District nine, which covers Michigan City, northern LaPorte County, and parts of eastern Porter County.

“I absolutely do not support this special session just for redistricting. I think it's absolutely uncalled for at a time in this country when the federal government shut down, we've got a lot more things to worry about than redistricting,” said Novak.

He says there is a process in place to do this–when it’s time. Novak continued to say people need to do the right thing, and this is not it.

“I'm new, obviously, to the legislators. I'm very new to it, but I've been around long enough with county government and everything else, and know the majority of the legislators don't want this, and this is being pushed on us by the Governor because of his ties with Washington D.C., and I would hope that the legislators, my colleagues, care enough about the residents of Indiana, because the majority of residents don't want this either,” said Novak.

Polling done recently by Independent Indiana shows 53 percent of Hoosiers oppose redistricting and 34 percent support it.

Local political expert, Dr. Elizabeth Bennion, is Chancellor's Professor of Political Science at IUSB. She explained how redistricting works.

Redistricting already happened five years ago. Bennion says every ten years, after the US census, states are required to redistrict. This is when state legislatures draw the lines for both their state districts and US congressional districts.

Bennion says to goal of redistricting is to make sure the population is roughly equal in each district, ideally, to create fair representation for people as states gain or lose population.

“What happens is that the party in power tends to engage in what we call partisan gerrymandering, and that means that they use computer programs to maximize their number of seats in the legislative body, whether that is the State House, State Senate, or the US Congress. What they can do then is to sort voters so that they can maximize the number of seats that their party gets. This means that it can be very unrepresentative. What's proposed now, for example, is taking a state like Indiana that has 77.8% of the congressional delegation, seven out of nine seats are held by the Republicans, and to make that nine out of nine, 100% of the seats. The problem with that is that about 40% of voters in Indiana are Democrats,” said Bennion.

She says Republicans and Democrats both engage in party gerrymandering–and it's not uncommon.

“Republicans overall have more advantages, both at the state level and in Congress, because they control more state legislatures. So, they have been doing this more effectively, and they've had more opportunity to do it. What is unusual here is that it's happening mid-cycle, and that the request is out front. We're not pretending to make fair maps. We are specifically asking, in this case, the President and the Vice President are specifically asking Indiana legislators and legislators in other states to get them more seats in the next midterm, to protect their victory in the next midterm, to try to determine the results of an election before a single vote is cast, by having the politicians choose the voters instead of the other way around,” said Bennion.

She says it gets controversial when we move away from redistricting being for fair population representation, to using it for party dominance.

“What this means for Indiana voters, however, is that you could have districts drawn so that Democrats are intentionally separated into different districts, so they will always be the minority, and they will never be able to elect a representative who actually reflects their point of view, despite having about 40% of the votes. That would make the state of Indiana less well represented, less fairly represented,” said Bennion.

Bennion says the GOP is overrepresented on state and national levels.

“There are many reasons for this. One is partisan gerrymandering. The other is geographic sorting. Democrats tend to live in big cities. Those big cities tend to be dominated by Democrats. For the purpose of redistricting, that's not good for Democrats, because they are very concentrated into one district, whereas Republicans are more evenly, efficiently, if you will, distributed among suburban and rural districts, and so they can get more seats. So, part of it is geographic sorting, but that's not the whole story. I mean, the other part of the story is our election policies, where some of the policies actually favor people who are higher on the socioeconomic ladder. They have an easier time voting. They also just tend to turn out in higher rates. So, Republicans tend to turn out more than Democrats. And so, we see there some additional seats as well for Republicans,” said Bennion.

Last week, Politico reported that Indiana senate republicans did not have the votes to make redistricting happen.

Bennion says some state Republicans are against mid-cycle redistricting, but it’s difficult for members of the state legislature to ‘buck the party trend’ and vote against this.

“It'll be interesting to see what happens with those holdouts who are really just trying to do what they see as the right thing, but are feeling an intense amount of partisan pressure in this context, where everything is being nationalized,” said Bennion.