Dr. Stephen Voss has been a political science professor at the University of Kentucky since 1998. Last year, he was called on by Attorney General Daniel Cameron to testify in the case that’s now before the state Supreme Court.
“They brought me in, not to defend the maps, they brought me in to explain the problems with some analysis, a couple of Boston based political scientists were offering to criticize the maps. So I really I was criticizing the criticism rather than defending the maps themselves.”
Cameron’s office is defending legislative maps drawn up by the Republican supermajority in the General Assembly after the 2020 census. Democrats who brought the suit lost in Franklin Circuit Court, then appealed the decision.
“The state legislative maps, including the house map being challenged, clearly was designed to help the Republican Party, compared to the map it replaced. Now, in that sense, I would call the current house map gerrymander, even a partisan gerrymander. What's less clear is whether it is a worse partisan gerrymander than the map it replaces, which had been drawn by the Democrats to help the Democrats.”
The word “gerrymander” dates back more than two centuries, so gerrymandering is nothing new, and appeals to block such efforts have rarely been successful. Voss said one alternative – establishing independent commissions so that politicians don’t pick their voters – may not be any better.
“I'm skeptical that independent commissions on balanced improve the situation. I mean, how many members are going to be on those commissions compared to how many people you have in a legislature, you know, a legislature is full of people who have incentives to know small territories of the state.”
Voss said he’d rather not venture a guess about the outcome of the case – that what matters most is whether the state high court establishes new rules for the next redistricting, after the 2030 census.
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