By Daniella Cheslow Feb 1, 2021
Virginia is almost certain to miss its timeline for redistricting ahead of this year’s General Assembly elections after the U.S. Census Bureau announced a months-long delay in releasing its final numbers.
“We can’t really start to draw maps in Virginia for our districts until we get that redistricting data,” said Del. Marcus Simon (D-Falls Church), who is one of eight lawmakers appointed to a new state redistricting committee, alongside eight citizens.
Kathleen Styles, the chief of Decennial Communications and Stakeholder Relations for the U.S. Census Bureau, told a call of the National Conference of State Legislatures last week that her bureau would not meet its deadlines. She said apportionment data — used to determine the states’ number of congressional seats — would be delivered by April 30 instead of in January as originally scheduled. Redistricting data, which is the granular data used to draw the state and local government districts, would be delayed from March to July 2021, at the earliest.
Styles said that the delay was due to COVID-19 and an aggressive hurricane season and wildfires in the western states, as well as civil unrest stemming from racial justice protests and legal challenges to the census operation.
“March 18, we did our first shutdown in the field, where we pulled back our staff,” she said.
Simon said the delays would be especially challenging because Virginia and New Jersey typically receive their data a few weeks earlier than other states to account for their off-year statewide elections. This year, every member of Virginia’s House of Delegates is up for election, as is the governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general.
“Normally, we’d be expecting to get our census data in Virginia in the next two weeks or so,” he said. “It usually comes in about mid-February in the year following the census.”
The delay comes as Virginia was poised to redraw its voting maps for the first time using a newly installed bipartisan panel. Until now, lawmakers alone were responsible for drawing the voting maps, in a process that frequently triggered lawsuits. In 2019, a federal court ordered that several Republican-drawn districts be changed due to racial gerrymandering.
In November, voters approved a constitutional amendment that created the bipartisan redistricting panel. The panel convened for the first time in January and would have drawn new maps that would have stood for a decade. Now, voters will go to the polls to choose the members of the House of Delegates based on old district maps.
Brian Cannon, a longtime proponent of redistricting reform and the outgoing executive director of the OneVirginia2021 organization, said the delay was unfortunate.
“It’s not a state problem, it’s obviously a federal and a COVID problem,” he said.
He said “it looks almost impossible” the House of Delegates members would run in new districts; however, he touted the court rulings from two years ago that caused 11 districts to be redrawn, ultimately creating change in several neighboring districts as well.
“The good news is the courts have stepped in to undo the racial gerrymandering from 2011 and to make the districts much more reflective of Virginia,” he said. “The lines aren’t quite as stale as they might have otherwise been.”