More Mapping

Critics of the new legislative maps unveiled by Indiana House Republicans say they “have have historically extreme levels of partisan bias.”

Women4Change Indiana engaged national gerrymandering expert Dr. Christopher Warshaw to analyze the new maps for US Congressional districts and the districts for Indiana House of Representatives presented by the Indiana House Elections Committee on Tuesday.

Dr. Warshaw’s major findings included:

• Though 44% of Indiana voters generally vote Democratic, the proposed maps will give Democrats –
  • only 22% of the congressional seats (7 of 9), and
  • only 31% of the seats in the state House (31 of 100).
• The proposed maps “have historically extreme levels of partisan bias.”
  • They are roughly equivalent to the severely biased 2011 maps.
  • Both proposed maps are more biased towards Republicans than 90% of all plans enacted in the United States over the past 50 years, for which data exists.

o   The proposed Congressional plan is more biased towards Republicans than 97% of the same 50-year set of plans in all 50 states.

• These extreme levels of partisan bias are very unlikely to be explainable by geography.

You can view a copy of the report here.

You can also hear Women4Change and Dr. Warshaw’s comments in the Leon-Tailored Audio above.  It runs for about 31 minutes.