'Formidable Obstacles' Ahead - Experts Say Redrawing New Jersey's Political Boundaries Will Not Be Easy

With the numbers from the 2010 Census now out, New Jersey faces the challenge of redrawing boundaries of 13 Congressional districts to create 12 and shifting lines for 40 state Legislative districts to make them more level in population.

That process – one often rife with partisan politics – is something that was the subject of a public forum held recently on the Educational Testing Service campus in Lawrence Township. The discussion, entitled “Redistricting in New Jersey: The Challenges Ahead,” was sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Lawrence Township in association with the Leagues of Women Voters of Hopewell Valley, Princeton Area and Hightstown-East Windsor. 

Before a packed audience, guest speakers Len Preston, Benjamin Brickner and Ingrid Reed defined redistricting, analyzed the new 2010 data in comparison to the 2000 Census figures, and discussed what the redistricting  process may look like as political power is reshuffled across the state to account for geographic shifts in population over the last decade.

Preston, chief of labor market information at the New Jersey Department of Labor & Workforce Development’s State Data Center, said the state’s population growth has slowed in the last decade – only up 4.5 percent since 2000. He noted the Garden State’s previous growth rate was 13 percent, according to a comparison of figures from the 1990 and 2000 censuses.

Preston said the slowing of growth is significant because states that exhibited high percentage yields of population growth gained seats in the House of Representatives, while those that didn’t grow as much lost seats. As a result, New Jersey will lose one of its 13 Congressional seats.

He noted that there will now be approximately 733,000 people per representative.  In 2000, there was one representative for every 647,725 people.

Broken down by county, Preston noted that Ocean County showed the largest increase in population in the 2010 Census. Bergen County remained the most populated county, and Salem County remained the least populated.

New Jersey’s population increased most rapidly in the central, coastal and southern regions. 

Recognizing that shift is significant because it will directly determine how the political boundary lines are redrawn, said Benjamin Brickner, author of “Reading Congressional and State Legislative Redistricting, Their Reform in Iowa, Arizona and California, and Ideas for Change in New Jersey.”

The challenge, he continued is how to effectively and fairly redraw the districts.

In his research, Brickner said, he found that “the New Jersey redistricting process is insular and opaque,” and that partisan advantage is a primary motive of New Jersey redistricting commissions.

The goal, he said, should be to avoid gerrymandering – the manipulation of district boundaries to enhance electoral votes; and “packing” – the act of putting voters of the same voting tendency into certain areas.

But the commission responsible for redistricting in New Jersey is frequently rife with political agendas that often result in glacial-pace movement and, at times, gridlock, he said.

Based on his research, Brickner proposes opening up the process to include more public participation and to limit the number of partisan commissioners by requiring the selection of political independents. Or, he added, bi-partisian cooperation could be encouraged by making a deadlock a risky proposition for the commissioners.

Either way, Brickner concluded, the “obstacles are many and formidable.”

Ingrid Reed, former director of the New Jersey Project at Rutgers’ Eagleton Institute of Politics, said the reason why the redistricting issue resonates with so many is because “this is not a democrat or republican issue. This is people like you and me, the way people vote is important.”

Reed said another layer to the complexity of redistricting is the element of competitiveness.

“A lot of our districts are formed a demography. Like-minded people live near one another. The way the lines are drawn, has resulted in the fact that it’s very difficult to win in one half if you’re a Democrat, or hard to win in the other side if you’re a Republican,” Reed said.

The reason it isn’t a good idea to split municipalities up or shift the districts too much, she added, is that it directly impacts voter information and participation.

Either way, several local Leagues of Women Voters called recent public hearings on redistricting in Camden and Newark a positive “step in the right direction.”

For more information about the League of Women Voters and their involvement in local redistricting issues visit www.lwv.org.