Partisan gerrymandering is not ok unless we're doing it, says Md. Republicans

[New Breed Leader]

A Maryland judge has thrown out the state’s congressional map, calling it an “extreme partisan gerrymander” in what is a victory for Republicans who said Democrats in the state General Assembly sought to silence their votes.

The ruling Friday by Anne Arundel County Senior Judge Lynne A. Battaglia marks the first time in Maryland history a judge has found a congressional map violated the state constitution, deciding that it violated rules laid out in Maryland law traditionally applied to legislative districts requiring them to be compact and to give regard to political subdivisions. She also ruled that the map in turn violated the state constitution’s equal protection, free speech and free elections clauses.

She said the weight of the evidence “yields the conclusion that the 2021 Congressional Plan in Maryland is an ‘outlier,’ an extreme gerrymander that subordinates constitutional criteria to political considerations.”

In this case, Republican plaintiffs had argued that the congressional map — which passed the General Assembly on an overwhelming party-line vote in December — violated the Maryland Constitution’s protections of free speech, free and frequent elections and its equal protection clause by suppressing the strength of Republican voters.

Throughout the trial, witnesses for the Republican plaintiffs presented evidence that they said showed partisanship was the “dominant” consideration of map-drawers. Sean Trende, an elections analyst at RealClearPolitics, said the trend that he observed is that map-drawers apparently intended to “crack” the strength of Republican voters by spreading them out in heavily blue districts, where they are not likely to affect the outcome of an election. For example, map-drawers took Republican voters in Harford County out of the 1st District and put them in the blue 3rd District — while carving out blue Harford precincts near the Chesapeake Bay and keeping them in the 1st.

Link to tweet