The Alaska Supreme Court today delivered its long-awaited full decision in the lawsuit challenging Alaska’s redistricting maps, driving home last year’s finding that the Alaska Redistricting Board’s attempt to boost the representation of the deeply conservative Eagle River was an unconstitutional gerrymander.
The 112-page ruling doesn’t mince words about the actions of the Alaska Redistricting Board, led by a three-member Republican majority, or the legal arguments made to defend the plan, calling elements of the defense “specious” and “frivolous.”
The ruling leaves the district maps used in the 2022 election as interim maps in place, putting an extremely high bar for any attempt for the board to revisit them ahead of the 2024 elections.
While several challenges were brought against the Alaska Redistricting Board’s work, the leading case centers on the Alaska Redistricting Board’s attempt to put the two House districts covering Eagle River into two different Senate districts rather than a single, united Eagle River Senate district. After an initial ruling finding the pairing problematic sent the Alaska Redistricting Board back to the drafting table, the board’s three-member conservative majority attempted a similar scheme to boost Eagle River’s representation in the Senate.
The Alaska Supreme Court rejected both attempts—which led to the 2022 elections being conducted with a single Eagle River-controlled Senate seat—and today’s ruling wrote that the “pairing’s political undertones are impossible to ignore.”
“We expressly recognize that partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional under the Alaska Constitution,” the Supreme Court’s order explains. “There is ample evidence of regional and political partisanship in this case.”
The ruling covers a long list of arguments brought against the Alaska Redistricting Board, highlighting comments by Board Member Bethany Marcum that the plan would give Eagle River “more representation” and that the only person among those who initially testified on the Senate pairings to be in favor of the split pairings was GOP operative Randy Ruedrich, the former chair of the Alaska Republican Party.
“The Board’s justification for pairing a Muldoon House district and an Eagle River House district in the face of overwhelming public opposition from both communities is difficult to understand unless some form of regional or political partisanship were involved,” the court explained. “Considering the rushed manner in which the Board adopted the Senate District K pairing, the nearly unanimous public opposition, and the contrasting political effects of the pairing on Muldoon’s and Eagle River’s voting power, we agree with the superior court that the record supports the inference that partisanship was at play.”
Or, in other words, you don’t have to explicitly say you’re gerrymandering—as the legal team for the Alaska Redistricting Board argued—for the courts to find you were gerrymandering.
Another big-ticket piece from the ruling is how the board should weigh the connections of different communities within the same city.
One of the critical arguments made by the Alaska Redistricting Board during its process and in the subsequent trial is that cities, like Anchorage, are automatically considered socio-economically integrated for redistricting. Under that reasoning, the board’s conservative majority argued, it could essentially do whatever it wanted with the shape of the House districts within Anchorage and the pairing of House districts to make Senate districts.
It was okay, they argued, that the Eagle River was matched with East Anchorage because they were both within the municipality of Anchorage.
In a ruling that will significantly shape Alaska’s redistricting process moving forward, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled otherwise. The order finds that communities with Anchorage do not automatically share socio-economic interests just because they are within the municipality’s boundaries. To consider the city’s different neighborhoods all the same, the Supreme Court finds, would open the door to more gerrymandering.
“Even if we disagreed with the strong evidence that the Muldoon and Eagle River areas constitute separate communities of interest, it would be unwise to hold, categorically, that separate communities of interest cannot exist within a single borough,” the order explains. “As Alaska’s largest city, Anchorage likely will continue growing more populous and diverse. The historical, economic, or traditional significance of neighborhoods may change with time, and courts should remain open to hearing evidence that certain Anchorage neighborhoods are sufficiently different from one another that they constitute separate communities of interest. Categorically holding that no subregion of Anchorage can be a community of interest would expose Alaskans to gerrymandering.”
What’s next
While the Alaska Supreme Court appears wary of doing so, the ruling technically gives the Alaska Redistricting Board one last shot at attempting to redraw the maps. The maps that were used in the 2022 election came at the order of Superior Court Judge Thomas Matthews, meaning they’re technically interim maps and not final. The big issue, the Supreme Court order notes, is that the public was never allowed to challenge the constitutionality of the interim plan that was adopted shortly before the 2022 candidate filing deadline.
“Having concluded that the Board engaged in unconstitutional gerrymandering in its initial final redistricting plan and that the Board then did so again in its amended final redistricting plan, our remanding for yet another redistricting plan may be questioned,” it said. “But we will remand out of respect for the Board’s constitutional role in redistricting.”
However, the Alaska Redistricting Board must convince Judge Matthews that reopening the maps is warranted. If they can’t, then the board is directed to finalize the plan.
The ruling
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Twitter.
