On the MIRS Monday podcast, democrat operative Mark Grebner, who was one of the plotters behind the Michigan Independent Redistricting Commission, revealed that it was actually fraudulently designed to allow more gerrymandering.
This isn't a surprise to those who closely studied the proposal. But it should be news to the millions of voters who assumed that the proposal was intended to produce reasonable district maps. The proposal has a ranked list of priorities that the commission is supposed to follow. At the top of the list are nearly equal populations, following the Voting Rights Act, and being contiguous, which were already law prior to the proposal. After that, the commission is instructed to draw districts based on 'communities of interest'.
What are they? Since there is no objective definition, a community of interest can be anything the commissioners want it to be. Moreover, this concept has been used to ignore traditional redistricting criteria like compactness that minimizing county and city splits.
The key quote came 22 minutes into the podcast:
'Communities of interest' is a will-o'-the-wisp. It's a reef of smoke. It can be whatever is necessary. And the crucial thing is who decides what's a community of interest that gets preserved. Answer: the commission does. Right? And who gets to review that? Frankly, nobody does. OK? So it's up to them. Now, was this originally intended? Yes. Yes. That's all I'm gonna say. Just, yes. That was built in, it was understood from the beginning.
Provisions further down the list like county integrity and compactness were never intended to be followed. The commission was set up to gerrymander in the name of 'communities of interest'. Will the commissioners allow themselves to be manipulated?
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