The majority highlighted traditional redistricting criteria and partisan fairness as reasons why the court picked a map submitted by a group of Pennsylvanians from among more than a dozen proposals.
HARRISBURG — In February, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court announced that it had picked a new congressional map for the state — but didn’t explain why.outlining their positions, revealing differing perspectives on the judiciary’s role in redistricting and what exactly makes a fair map.
The majority opinion — written by Chief Justice Max Baer, a Democrat — outlined four reasons why the Carter map was chosen. Those criteria are compactness, contiguity, minimal splits, and equal population. The Carter map fulfilled all of them, but it didn’t score as well on some of these metrics as other maps.
The Carter map intentionally considered incumbency in order to avoid “inadvertently double-bunking sitting congressional representatives in the same district,” Jonathan Rodden, the professor who drew the map, wrote in a report to the court. To account for significant population loss in rural areas and growth in the southeast, two incumbents were paired.
To gauge if any group’s voting power had been diluted, the court considered a number of fairly new metrics including the efficiency gap, which indicates the number of “wasted votes” in each election or the number of votes that don’t contribute to a candidate’s victory.
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