All New Hampshire voters are entitled to fair and honest voting districts.
Back on January 5th, the majority in the NH House approved HB 52, a Congressional map which has been identified by the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, the ACLU and New Hampshire’s own Map-a-Thon project as being gerrymandered and uncompetitive. This map was engineered to override fair representation, the will of the voters and the outcome of future elections.
A map of NH House districts, HB 50, also passed, which willfully kept 56 eligible New Hampshire towns from receiving dedicated, constitutionally-guaranteed NH House Districts of their own. The Map-a-Thon Project had submitted maps that proved that number could have been substantially reduced, but more constitutionally-compliant maps were ignored.
In 2020 & 2021, 74 New Hampshire towns representing 561,000 voters passed the NH Resolution for Fair, Nonpartisan Redistricting by an average of a 3-1 margin. The demands of those cross-partisan voters were also ignored.
In 10 county hearings around New Hampshire and two hearings in Concord, over 100 voters from towns throughout the state begged for fair, nonpartisan maps. Those calls were ignored.
When the full NH House passed their maps, members of the majority who spent 2021 clamoring for more “election integrity” had the audacity to try to defend their gerrymandering of these rigged maps, claiming that they only wanted “fairness.” There is no integrity in either of their approved maps
Open Democracy Action now calls on the NH Senate to actually listen to their constituents, which held hearings on the NH Senate and Executive Council maps on January 10 and will hold hearings shortly on the NH House & Congressional maps.
Our legislature must put the needs of the Granite State and its citizens before partisan power. It should immediately throw out the majority’s proposed NH Senate, Executive Council, Congressional and House maps, and amend them with competitive bipartisan or independently-produced compromise maps. It’s what the voters want.
If the rigged maps don’t get amended and should reach his desk, Gov. Sununu must honor his words on NHPR’s “The Exchange” on March 9, 2021.
NHPR: “We received a lot of questions about redistricting. Here’s one from Anne. ‘Will you insist that the legislature’s redistricting committee uses a fair and transparent process for drawing the maps?’ And also says, ‘will you reject their work if it turns out to be gerrymandered and or has not allowed for sufficient public comment?’
Gov. Sununu responded: “The answer is yes and yes. It has to be transparent. In our entire state, I think there are a couple of districts you could point out that are really funky. Everyone could point to Executive Council district two. And I agree. That’s got to be fixed. It’s a weird one. It’s like a snake lying across the middle of the state. Very bizarre.
But I think for the most part – the House and the Senate districts – I can’t think of any that are really out of whack. We’ll look at the population. The House has their process and they put this committee together and it has to be done in a bipartisan way and be transparent. I always say with redistricting, it’s got to pass the smell test. You’ve got to be able to look at the map and say, OK, at first blush, this makes general sense. We’re not, like, twisting around here and there. Whatever we do, it has to be fair, it has to be balanced.”
Governor Sununu cannot claim that any of these maps are fair, balanced or “pass the smell test.” He should not only speak out against them, but unless they are amended to be fair and competitive, he must veto these rigged maps.
(Brian Beihl is deputy director of Open Democracy Action, nonpartisan nonprofit based in Concord, and lead organizer for the Map-a-Thon Citizen Mapping Project.)