Lessons from Michigan’s Successful Independent Redistricting Commission

House Bill 31 and Senate Bill 131, introduced this year in Pennsylvania’s General Assembly, incorporate lessons learned from that success. Libertarian think tank RStreet Institute described Michigan’s commission as “a model for other states”. According to their report:

Katie Fahey, founder and executive director of Michigan’s Voters Not Politicians during their push for the citizen referendum, joined Fair Districts PA Chair Carol Kuniholm on May 8 for a Zoom conversation about the process of reform, the impact on Michigan, and lessons learned that can help the work in Pennsylvania.

As Fahey reminded those who attended, Michigan’s new commission was given its test run during the COVID pandemic, when data from the Census Bureau was released very late and the redistricting timeline was drastically shortened. Even so, the resulting maps were far more representative of Michigan’s communities than maps of the previous decades.

Fahey and the Voters Not Politicians team made clear in their work that both parties have been guilty of gerrymandering. In Michigan, Democrats gerrymandered maps drawn in 1982 and 1992, then Republicans gained the advantage and gerrymandered maps drawn in 2002 and 2012. According to PlanScore, a non-partisan platform offering four respected metrics for evaluating partisan bias, the 2022 maps drawn for Michigan’s congressional and state House and Senate seats are the most balanced Michigan has seen in half a century — offering no significant advantage to either party.

There’s much to be learned from the work in Michigan. In 2024, the non-partisan Campaign Legal Center produced a detailed report: Redistricting Commissions in the 2021 Redistricting Cycle: Case Studies and Lessons Learned for 2031 and Beyond. The report includes examples from across the country, with numerous case studies of what worked well in Michigan and what worked less well.

Among the many lessons learned from the Michigan process and incorporated into PA House Bill 31 and Senate Bill 131:

• Randomizing commissioner selection from vetted candidate pools is the surest way to prevent partisan influence on commissioner selection and avoids even the appearance of impropriety. 11
• There must be purposeful outreach to have a diverse applicant pool of potential commissioners. 15
• The best commissions will have a roughly equal distribution between Democratic, Republican, and independent or unaffiliated commissioners. 16
• The process by which commissions select their legal and expert advisors must be designed to attract a broad base of options. 25
• Redistricting criteria should be clearly defined and ranked in order of priority in the law itself or by early decision of the commission. 28
• Commissions must hire quality VRA [Voting Rights Act] counsel and consultants and provide commissioners with training and analysis as early as possible before line-drawing begins. 29
• State-level protections for minority vote dilution should be clearly distinguished from requirements to comply with the federal VRA. 31
• The gold standard for mapmaking is a public-facing, consensus-building process. 43
• Requirements for commissions to collect public input are important, as are requirements to ensure that input is incorporated into final maps. 46
• Public input will be more effective if commissions are required to show — and justify — their work. 47
• A clear, specific fallback mechanism is important for the overall success of redistricting commissions even when they stall or fail. 49

One of the top lessons learned, from Michigan’s successes and from failures in states with advisory, legislature-selected, or semi-independent commissions:

Thank you Katie for your heroic work for Michigan voters and for sharing your ideas and experience with PA redistricting reformers.

For further reading:

Redistricting Commissions in the 2021 Redistricting Cycle: Case Studies and Lessons Learned for 2031 and Beyond, Campaign Legal Center, 2024

Michigan’s Independent Redistricting Commission: A model for other states, R Street, 2022

Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission, Official Michigan government website

We Ended Partisan Gerrymandering in Michigan, Voters Not Politicians: Redistricting