BY MARK J. CRAWFORD
Telegraph Editor
STARKE — During a workshop on redistricting Monday, county commissioners and school board members agreed on a map that — with a few tweaks — should soon be ready for adoption.
The map narrows the deviation in voting population among the districts while maintaining District 1 as a majority minority district.
The map was prepared by the ACLU based on an original map submitted by law student Colson Douglas. Douglas has been active for more than a year, encouraging leaders to take up the constitutional duty to redistrict so that people can be more fairly represented. He’s made presentations to the commission and school board, and spent time work with leaders on map proposals.
To ensure a majority minority district in this version, District 1 will wrap around District 3, taking in voters to the west and south of Starke.
Responding to concerns from District 4 and 5 representatives about the impact to the Hampton and Hampton Lake area, shifts are planned to avoid splitting those communities.
Nick Ward from the ACLU said its submission cleaned up some of the lines on a previous version and utilized the boards’ discretion to split census blocks and use other boundaries to keep communities together.
Census blocks use visible features such as roads, railroads and water bodies to divide the voting population. It is a combination of census blocks that make up a voting district. Sticking to those blocks alone, however, made it difficult to preserve the larger minority population in District 1 and keep the district reasonably compact.
Ward said the ACLU map splits just six census blocks using property lines. Voter addresses were used to estimate how much of the voting population lives on either side of the line.
On the fly, and with assistance from Matt Barksdale from the elections office, Ward was able to make some changes that shifted his original numbers, reducing District 2 and 5 and increasing the number of voters in District 4 by returning area around Hampton.
District 1—4,825
District 2—4,877
District 3—4,706
District 4—5,138
District 5—4,946
The minority population of District 1 is 51.8% on this map, but Ward said courts require more than population numbers when determining whether minority voters are given an opportunity to elect a candidate they prefer as the Voting Rights Act requires. The ACLU performed a functional analysis that determined all three proposed maps based on Douglas’ work met the requirement.
“That looks at past election results, how much crossover voting there is from other portions of the electorate in supporting candidates that are preferred by Black voters, voter registration actions in recent elections,” Ward said.
He said the ACLU would also provide the legal boundary descriptions for the elections office.
Asked whether the boards could legally approve a map with District 1’s proposed boundaries — as odd as they seem — Ward said they could since the basis is compliance with the Voting Rights Act.
“That’d be my advice, yes, it is. Because that’s not only a permissible goal, but a mandatory one,” he said.
Ward said his strategy was to add a little bit to District 1 from the other districts instead of having a large impact in one area.
The county commission and school board will workshop the map one more time at 5 p.m. on Monday, April 10. Based on that the county commission may adopt the new districts later in April and the school board would adopt them in May.
