AP Photo/Julie Carr Smyth
Give instructions to map drawers
“For redistricting authorities to be able to consider a given comment it must include two elements: a location and an instruction. For example, one of the most common kinds of comments is to suggest a city or neighborhood be kept together in a single district. Other examples of feasible instructions include a request to draw a group of cities together in a single district, use well-known boundaries like county lines or mountain ranges as borders between districts, or separate two cities into different districts.”
Think small
“Comments that touched upon a smaller area — on the order of a neighborhood in most cases — were substantially more likely to be adopted in final maps than comments that related to larger areas, like a suggestion to group a set of counties together in the same district.”
Define your community and talk about its need for representation
“Communities can also be defined by the people within them. For example, one person testifying before the California redistricting commission argued that the people living in “Lamorinda” deserved to be drawn into the same district due to their demographic profiles and high degree of interaction as observed through commuting patterns, little league sports, and the like. The only problem, as one commissioner pointed out, is that you cannot find Lamorinda on the map. Instead, this community is actually a combination of three separate cities in the state: Lafayette, Moraga, and Orinda. That the residents of the area even have a nickname for their community was remarkable for the commissioner at the time, and these cities ended up together in the newly drawn 11th District when the commission unveiled its congressional map for the state.”
Online mapping programs can help persuade.
“In the 2020 cycle…there are multiple platforms to easily make a map of your local community to share as part of testimony — including references to the same data that the redistricting authorities use when drawing maps — like Dave’s Redistricting App, Districtr, and Representable, each of which allows you to identify the area including your community. Testimony to a redistricting authority may carry more weight if that information is conveyed along with a visual reference to guide the hands of the line drawers.”
Be prepared for less time.
“It may be vital to be ready to quickly summarize the main points of your comments before your allotted time expires and not use a question from a commissioner or legislature to clarify your comments. If, however, your comments run long, you can also include longer comments and supplemental materials, like a map, in an email to the commission or legislature too.”
Build neighborhood coalitions
“These hearings also provide a great opportunity for coalition-building among your neighbors to collectively advocate for a particular district configuration…However, there are dangers that the body receiving testimony from a group of neighbors will also become adept at recognizing repetitive testimony and weigh that content less than they might otherwise…Spending the time to develop authentic testimony, spoken from the heart, is much better than having a number of people deliver identical, scripted testimony.”
“The public can and should play a role in the redistricting process. With some preparation and coordination among your neighbors, you too can be ready to step up to the podium and explain the contours of your communities to the authorities tasked with drawing new districts.”
Click here for more information about the Virginia Redistricting Commission’s public hearings.