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By Marilyn Odendahl

The Indiana Citizen

June 23, 2023

Joe Newman has a strong connection to District 6 in the city of Anderson.

He grew up there and lives in the house his grandparents owned, noting the front porch is where his father first met his mother. For the past 20 years, Newman has represented the district on the city’s common council, listening to constituents on the streets and in the neighborhoods he wandered as a child.

Currently, residents are complaining about streetlights, sidewalks and roads that have fallen into disrepair. Newman – himself – is concerned about “jobs, jobs and gun violence.”

No one, the councilman pointed out, is asking about redistricting.

However, the lawsuit filed June 13 by voting rights groups and two Anderson residents spotlights the city’s failure to redraw the lines of the six council districts. The complaint – Common Cause Indiana et al. v. City of Anderson Common Council and the Madison County Board of Elections, 1:23-cv-1022 – was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana.

Plaintiffs claim Anderson’s council districts are “severely malapportioned” and violate the Constitution and state law by giving some voters a stronger voice than others. They assert each district should have the same size population of 9,130 individuals but the current districts are swinging from 7,490 people in District 4 to 11,644 in District 3.

Julia Vaughn, executive director of Common Cause Indiana, said redistricting impacts all the issues that raise residents’ concerns, like burned out streetlights and gun violence.

 “This is about every other issue that you care about because if the maps aren’t drawn fairly, then we aren’t going to have fair representation in either Congress or the Statehouse or city councils across Indiana,” Vaughn said. “That’s not a good thing because if you’re not fairly represented, they don’t have to listen to you, the voter.”

Every 10 years with the release of the U.S. Census numbers, states and local communities across the country are required to redraw their voting districts. Typically, the fight breaks out over the redrawn maps and accusations of unfairly drawing the districts to disenfranchise certain voters. The Brennan Center for Justice reported that as of June 12, a total of 74 lawsuits had been filed challenging the new congressional and legislative maps in 27 states.

Anderson stands out because the redistricting dispute is about the lines not being redrawn. Public officials claim the city has not made any major changes to the district maps since the 1980 census, according to The (Anderson) Herald Bulletin.

At the council’s December 2022 meeting, Newman pushed the ordinance that retained the districts even while the census data shows the city’s population shrank from 56,129 in 2010 to 54,788 in 2020. Ordinance 44-22 was given a first and second reading before the councilors suspended the rules and adopted the ordinance on a 6-to-3 vote.

 The ordinance was amended and presented, again, to the council at the Jan. 12, meeting. Councilors voted 9-to-0 but what specifically was changed from the original ordinance is unclear.

President of the Anderson Common Council, Rebecca Crumes, and chair of the Madison County Board of Elections, Russ Wills, did not return calls and emails seeking comment.

 “It’s about numbers,” Vaughn said. “And the numbers show that these districts are very uneven in terms of population and they’re going to have to be redrawn to ensure the constitutional principle of one person, one vote.”

Local redistricting

The city of Anderson is one of two second class Indiana cities to face legal action over redistricting since the 2020 census.

Gary and the Lake County Board of Elections and Registrations were sued in January when the city council decided not to redraw the maps even though the districts had become malapportioned. Plaintiffs calculated the population deviation to be 24%, well above the 10% population deviation that courts have set as the cap for how widely the districts can vary.

Anderson’s deviation is 46%, according to the complaint.

“Not drawing maps can be a form of gerrymandering,” Vaughn said. “Malapportionment doesn’t respect the principle of one person, one vote. It gives some voters a bigger voice than others.”

Once the 2020 census data was released, much of the attention was given to redistricting of congressional and state legislative districts. However, former DePauw University instructor Kelsey Kauffman has focused her research on redistricting at the local level and has found spotty compliance with state law and court rulings.

Despite the Indiana Code mandating county councils redraw their district lines the year after the federal census, Kauffman and her students determined 23 county councils in 2021 failed to redistrict or violated key statutory requirements.

The research into school boards is ongoing but Kauffman and her team have so far found that of the 31 required to redistrict, 10 exempted themselves from having to redraw their maps by switching their method of electing members from electoral districts to residential districts. Another 11 school boards had not redistricted as of February 2022.

Anderson was the only one of Indiana’s 23 second class cities – municipalities with populations between 35,000 and 600,000 – to have skipped redistricting. Yet, Kauffman noted several of the other cities had problems including dissents among council members and the public or maps that had districts that were either malapportioned, not contiguous or splitting voting precincts.

Kauffman said local officials are confused about redistricting. They do not know the maps have to be redrawn after the census or they do not know how to create new districts that comply with the law and the U.S. Constitution. Also, sometimes they believe the process will be so expensive their communities cannot afford to redistrict.

According to The Herald Bulletin, city attorney Paul Podlejski warned the city council could be subjected to a lawsuit for not updating the district maps. But councilman Ollie Dixon, who represents District 4, feared that changing the districts’ lines would potentially erase the council’s only majority-minority district.

Kauffman did make a presentation to the council, letting them know the maps could be redrawn for no cost.

“I think a lot of people who are officials are scared to deal with redistricting,” Kauffman said. “I can understand their concern. I tried very hard to reassure them we could redistrict and still do it in a lawful way.”

Kauffman believes the Indiana General Assembly has hamstrung local governments.

State law prohibits voting precincts to be divided by district lines. This is especially troublesome for the seven Indiana counties that have fewer than 10,000 people, Kauffman said, and the precincts have to be split in order for the new districts to have a 10% or lower deviation.

For those counties still using the traditional precinct-based voting, proposes local governments be allowed to redraw the precinct boundaries after the new council districts have been set.

In 2022, the legislature passed House Enrolled Act 1285 which created another obstacle for local governments. Specifically, the law included the provision that local redistricting had to be completed by Dec. 31, 2022. As a consequence, Kauffman and Vaughn said, a lawsuit is, now, the only remedy when the deadline is missed.

Diluting voters’ voices

Newman is bewildered and angered by the redistricting lawsuit.

He has served his district for two decades, carrying on the family tradition of serving Anderson starting with his grandfather who was chief of police in the 1930s and continuing with his father who served as county clerk and his brother who was a judge in Madison County.

Newman was blindsided by the lawsuit and wishes the plaintiffs would have let the council know they were going to court.

“I don’t know why we’re being sued and I couldn’t care less,” Newman said.

The complaint describes the problem with Anderson’s current maps as diluting voters’ voices.

Residents squeezed into District 3 have less “voting strength” than the people in underpopulated Districts 4, 5 and 6. The plaintiffs argue the unequal population among the districts deprives District 3 residents “of a vote that is approximately equal in weight to that of other voters.”

The plaintiffs assert that by not implementing proportional districts, the defendants are violating the Equal Protection Clause of the 14^th Amendment as well as Indiana Code sections 36-4-6-3(g)(1) and 3-5-10-7(a).

Although the Anderson defendants have yet to file a response to the lawsuit with the court, Vaughn expects a similar outcome in this case as what happened in Gary where the parties quickly reached a settlement. The defendants acquiesced and reviewed several redrawn maps then chose one.

 “Actually it was a pretty contentious initial hearing,” Vaughn said, recalling the first time the parties appeared in court following the filing of the complaint in Gary. “Then after some really stern talk from the judge, I think they understood that they didn’t have any options here so they were better off sitting down with us in a cooperative manner and, at least, having some input into the map drawing.”

The Gary litigation was under a time crunch because of the 2023 municipal elections. As part of the court order following the settlement, Judge Philip Simon ordered the city to use the map for the 2023 primary and general elections for the common council.

In May, the judge awarded the plaintiff’s attorneys $67,380 in fees.

Believing they will prevail in their lawsuit, the Anderson plaintiffs are proposing the current malapportioned maps that were used in the primary stay in place for the November election. However, the council members elected in 2023 would have to run again in 2024 in the newly drawn districts. The municipal election cycle would the return to normal and those councilors elected in 2024 would face reelection in 2027.

Vaughn would like to see Anderson engage the community in the work of redrawing the district maps. She hopes nonprofits and residents will be able to provide their input and even submit their own maps.

“(It’s) really making sure that this is all about community and not about politics,” Vaughn said, “because, unfortunately, with the council  in charge of the process last year, it became all about politics, nothing about the community.”