Arguments are underway in the Florida Senate’s redistricting case. The Senate and a voting rights coalition are squaring off before a Leon County Circuit Judge.
The Florida Senate finds itself back in court after settling with a number of voting rights organizations earlier this year. The plaintiffs, led by the League of Women Voters, alleges the most recent version of the Senate district map violates anti-gerrymandering provisions in the state constitution. Under the settlement agreement the Senate admitted wrongdoing and arranged for a special session to revise its borders. At least that’s how it was supposed to work.
“The Legislature couldn’t jointly agree, but that’s the situation that we had in Apportionment Eight,” plaintiff attorney David King says. “At least each body had a map, that’s not the case even here.”
Apportionment Eight is the congressional redistricting case his side recently won before the Florida Supreme Court. King’s argument in the current case is similar to the one he used for that proceeding: our map is better because our districts are more compact.
But Senate attorney Raoul Cantero criticizes the plaintiffs’ submissions because they were drawn after the special session collapsed.
“They waited until we had a map and then looked at that map and then decided they were going to try to beat that,” Cantero says. “So it’s a game of leapfrog.”
He argues the Senate’s proposal is the end result of a process—one conducted out in the open for the public to see.
“They didn’t have a process,” Cantero says of the plaintiffs. “They will admit that they had a map drawer who drew maps in his apartment, with no supervision—didn’t release draft maps as they were doing it. We didn’t know anything about it until after the session.”
Of course this elides how that process broke down. The map the Senate is presenting in court was never approved by the chamber. Instead, at the direction of Senate redistricting chair Bill Galvano (R-Bradenton), it merges parts of two base maps drawn by legislative staffers.
As the case moves forward the judge will have to decide which of the plans—or which combination of plans—best aligns with constitutional demands that maps be compact and not drawn to favor a party or incumbent.
