In late October, redistricting reformers filed a ballot initiative for 2020 that would create an independent redistricting commission to draw Oklahoma's congressional and legislative maps. Supporters, which include the League of Women Voters, will have 90 days to collect nearly 178,000 signatures needed to put these constitutional changes on next year's ballot if their petition is approved
The proposal would create a nine-member commission with three Democrats, three Republicans, and three independent members whose affiliations have not changed for at least the past four years. Commissioners and their immediate family members can't have held or run for partisan elected office within the past five years, nor can they have been a lobbyist, paid party official, or state legislative employee within that same time period.
The chief justice of the state Supreme Court would appoint a panel of retired appellate judges to review applications to serve on the commission, all three of whom would be randomly selected, and all three panelists must agree when selecting any applicants. These retired judges would select a pool of 20 applicants for each of the three party groupings for 60 in total and would be required to take demographic and geographic diversity into account. Two applicants in each pool would be randomly chosen for six total; those six commissioners would then pick the remaining three by two-thirds supermajority agreement.
For the criteria used for drawing districts, the amendment gives first priority to preserving "communities of interest," followed in descending order of priority by racial and ethnic fairness, partisan fairness, integrity of local government subdivisions, and compactness.
Consideration of incumbency would be barred. The amendment would also ban the practice of "prison gerrymandering" and instead require that prisoners be counted for redistricting purposes at the address where they last lived rather than at the location where they're incarcerated.
The commission would have to hold numerous hearings, and it would take a six-vote supermajority to approve any map, including at least one commissioner from each of the three party groupings. If commissioners fail to pass any maps, the state Supreme Court would be tasked with doing so and would be required to follow the same criteria.
Legislators would no longer play any role in the process, meaning if this initiative passes, it would prevent Republicans from controlling redistricting again after the 2020 census, as they did this decade.
