High court affirms Maryland's redistricting map
The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed Monday a lower court's ruling upholding Maryland's new congressional redistricting plan, which counts inmates as living at their last-known addresses instead of in their prison cells. But it may not be the last word on the matter.
Some Republican lawmakers opposed to the map, drawn once each decade based on U.S. census counts, have until Saturday to submit the nearly 56,000 signatures needed to put it on the November ballot and let voters decide whether the plan stays.
They claim Gov. Martin O'Malley and leaders in the House and Senate unfairly separated districts to maximize their party's advantage and give Democrats a good shot at seizing the 6th District seat held by Republican Rep. Roscoe Bartlett.
Civil rights advocates laud the map's new system of counting prisoners as living in their home districts.
The change, enacted as part of the state's "No Representation without Population Act" of 2010, boosted Baltimore's population by about 0.9 percent, or 5,700 people, and shrank Somerset County's by more than 10 percent, or 2,700 people.
Liberal groups and urban-area lawmakers hailed the numbers shift as a first-in-the-nation civil rights victory because it stopped padding the population count in rural prison towns, artificially inflating their voting power. But others decried it as a power-play for metropolitan areas like Baltimore and Prince George's County.
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2012-06-25/news/bs-md-redistricting-plan-affirmed-20120625_1_counts-inmates-prison-population-census-counts
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