BY MARK J. CRAWFORD
Telegraph Editor
STARKE — County commissioners and school board members are back at work on redistricting, and they’ve been given a hard deadline if they want to get it done this year.
The delayed release of census information from 2020 is one reason redistricting has been postponed. Midterm elections were another.
Supervisor of Elections Amanda Seyfang and her office will begin preparing later this year for the presidential primary in March 2024. Ballots are mailed out in February. Additionally, the office must complete lists and maintenance activities 90 days prior to the election, which means they will be mailing voters about district and precinct changes in December of this year.
If leaders can decide on a map, her office will be looking at weeks of work making sure voters are in the correct districts and making any necessary precinct changes. This is manual work, she said, and it takes months to enter the information into the system and double check it for accuracy.
For that reason, she gave county and school board leaders until the end of May to decide on a new map for the five districts.
Assistant Supervisor of Elections Matt Barksdale is also the office’s IT expert. He instructed commissioners and school board members on using the site Davesredistricting.org. Anyone can create an account and begin using its features to redraw district lines by selecting census blocks — groups of voting-age residents.
The features of the site allow the user to see how the population and demographics of a district change as census blocks are added or taken away.
This is not a process of random selection, however. There are several goals leaders are trying to achieve, and it’s not as simple as it looks.
Districts need to be as equal in voting age population as practically possible. They also want to maintain a majority minority district, which helps ensure diverse representation. They are not allowed to remove an incumbent official from their district, and the district need to be contiguous and avoid strange boundaries. This generally means you can travel between two points in a district without crossing into another district.
Barksdale said in the past, maintaining a majority minority district was valued more than maintaining equally populated voting districts. Achieving both goals at once is proving difficult.
Leaders have been working on maps of their own, and they have maps proposed by law student Colson Douglas. Members of the public are also encouraged to develop and submit maps. The website allows transmitting maps to your which can be sent to the county manager’s office at [email protected] or the supervisor of elections office at [email protected].
Leaders also have the option of putting together a committee to evaluate and propose a selection of maps to the boards or to contract the work out to a consultant.
Nick Ward from the ACLU in Florida said he has been working with small cities and counties, including Starke, and offered his help as well.
“I do want to say from having worked in a lot of places from Jackson County and Panama City and other places, it’s all doable. I know it’s super stressful for you all probably as elected officials talking about this, but it’s all doable, and it’s all in the service of making sure that everyone has an equally weighted voice on the board,” he said.
The county commission and school board aim to hold another workshop on Feb. 27 and then discuss a timeline to hold public hearings on proposed changes.
