Appointed redistricting commissions have been selected. The State of Arizona has an Independent Redistricting Commission. Here in Mesa five 'non-partisan' members were approved by the city council on April 29, 2021 more than four months ago.
Related content from earlier posts on this blog are inserted farther down, but first some general
comments about the political proclivities for Republicans and Democrats
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RE-DISTRICTING: 2020 Census Data
Due to Covid-19 and other impacts, the decennial census data has been delayed several months. The U.S. Census Bureau announced that local census data will be delivered by August 16, 2021.
The August release of data is called the “Legacy Format” and it will not be in a format for public use. We anticipate converting the raw data into a usable format for public use in early September 2021.
This is yet another reason your input on how you define your community, your Community of Interest, is so important! Having your input now will only help the process once data is released and in a usable format.
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Republicans poised to rig the next election by gerrymandering electoral maps
A supreme court justice described the last round of gerrymandering as ‘dishonoring US democracy’. Another round is about to start – will this be another ‘political heist’?
"Ten years ago, Republicans pulled off what would later be described as “the most audacious political heist of modern times”. It wasn’t particularly complicated. Every 10 years, the US constitution requires states to redraw the maps for both congressional and state legislative seats. The constitution entrusts state lawmakers with the power to draw those districts. Looking at the political map in 2010, Republicans realized that by winning just a few state legislative seats in places like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, they could draw maps that would be in place for the next decade, distorting them to guarantee Republican control for years to come. Republicans executed the plan, called Project Redmap, nearly perfectly and took control of 20 legislative bodies, including ones in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Then, Republicans set to work drawing maps that cemented their control on power for the next decade. Working behind closed doors, they were brazen in their efforts. > Just a coincidence or not, here in Mesa February 2019 there was Project Red Hawk.
The area is a minimum of 160 contiguous acres - the Red Hawk property is approximately 187 acres - the 
project has been known to insiders by a code name, “Project Red Hawk,’’ for more than a year because Mesa signed a confidentiality agreement. (That may or may not be consequential for people moving into surrounding residential communities in District 6)
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Back to some statements from the article > . . .This manipulation, called gerrymandering, “debased and dishonored our democracy”, Justice Elena Kagan would write years later. It allowed Republicans to carefully pick their voters, insulating them from the accountability that lies at the foundation of America’s democratic system. Now, the once-a-decade process is set to begin again in just a few weeks and Republicans are once again poised to dominate it. And this time around things could be even worse than they were a decade ago.
> The redistricting cycle arrives at a moment when American democracy is already in peril. Republican lawmakers in states across the country, some of whom hold office because of gerrymandering, have enacted sweeping measures making it harder to vote. Republicans have blocked federal legislation that would outlaw partisan gerrymandering and strip state lawmakers of their authority to draw districts.
Advances in mapmaking technology have also made it easier to produce highly detailed maps very quickly, giving lawmakers a bigger menu of possibilities to choose from when they carve up a state. It makes it easier to tweak lines and to test maps to ensure that their projected results will hold throughout the decade.
“I’m very worried that we’ll have several states, important states, with among the worst gerrymanders in American history,” said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard, who closely studies redistricting. “That’s not good for democracy in those states.”
> In 2019, the supreme court said for the first time there was nothing federal courts could do to stop even the most excessive partisan gerrymandering, giving lawmakers a green light to be even more aggressive. 
> And because of the supreme court’s 2013 decision in the landmark Shelby County v Holder case, places with a history of voting discrimination will no longer have to get their maps approved by the federal government for the first time since 1965.
It’s a lack of oversight that could embolden lawmakers to attempt to draw districts that could dilute the influence of minority voters.
> ". . .Democrats and grassroots groups have spent the last few years educating citizens about the process and building up an army of volunteers across the country to closely monitor mapmaking. Part of that effort has been teaching people how to use publicly available technology to draw their own electoral maps.
> “It’s an entirely new world than 10 years ago in terms of public mapping software. The capacity for the wide public to draw their own maps and identify their own communities,” said Moon Duchin, a mathematician who leads the MGGG redistricting lab at Tufts University, which has built publicly available mapping tools. ========================================================================
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This time around, many states will have redistricting commissions for the first time, putting a bit more distance between the legislature and the process. And many states will be experimenting with collecting more and richer public input than ever before. Try your hand at redistricting! Make plans of your own and share them widely—in some cases, you can submit them as public input in your state.
You draw the lines.
If you’d like a custom module for your locality, fill out our request form. If you are interested in partnering with us or sponsoring a voting rights project, reach out to us at Districtr@mggg.org.
YOU CAN DRAW YOUR COMMUNITY
Communities of Interest (known as “COIs”) are groups or neighborhoods with significant shared interests that deserve consideration by representatives. Many states have rules that indicate that COIs should be kept whole by districting plans whenever possible.
But this has been one of the hardest to handle of all the priorities in the redistricting world—if you show up at a meeting to say your community matters, how does that information make its way to the line-drawers?Districtr lets you put your community on the map (literally!) by marking places that matter to make your shared interests visible.This year, more states than ever will be collecting community input in the redistricting process.
Districtr is a free, public web tool for districting and community identification, brought to you by the MGGG Redistricting Lab.
Origin story: The goal of Districtr is to put the tools of redistricting in the hands of the public, with an emphasis on meeting the needs of civil rights organizations, community groups, and redistricting commissions.
Districtr came about from a conversation with Lawyers for Civil Rights (LCR), the Boston arm of the national Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. LCR was describing their work with community members in Lowell, MA, who were frustrated about not having a voice in the city council
Reference: We are also asking the public to identify their communities using DistrictR, an online public mapping tool at https://districtr.org/tag/mesaaz. This allows you to share how you think city council districts should be drawn to best represent your community.
All maps submitted will be carefully reviewed by the Redistricting Commission.
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Empowered with those maps, members of the public can better challenge lawmakers on their justification for drawing strange-looking maps, said William Desmond, a redistricting expert who advised Arizona’s redistricting commission in 2010 and is working with California’s this year.
“Members of the public and interested parties, there’s going to be a lot more avenues open to them if they want to try their hand at drawing their own districts,” he said. “If they want to test the claims, like, ‘OK you said you can only do this if you split these counties, let’s see if I can take a whack at it.’ There’s lots more ways you can do it this time, and a lot higher level of quality.”
These points: Adam Kincaid, the director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, a GOP group focused on redistricting, downplayed the effects of Project Redmap.
“Redmap has kind of taken on this mythos about what it was and what it was not. The reality was Redmap was a campaign to raise money to fund state legislative races around redistricting,” he said. “The best guardrails for gerrymandering have always been the American electorate. Shifting electorates break gerrymandering.”
>Some states - Arizona is one - have chosen to strip lawmakers of their ability to draw districts altogether.
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RELATED CONTENT
What you can do is outlined farther down with links, contacts and phone numbers
All maps submitted will be carefully reviewed by the Redistricting Commission.
Public Workshops Scheduled for Mesa City Council Redistricting
Every ten years, local governments, including the City of Mesa, use new census data to redraw their City Council district lines to reflect how local populations have changed. Mesa's nonpartisan Redistricting Commission, a five-member panel created by mandate of the City Charter, has scheduled a series of public workshops to get input from our residents:
Public Workshops Scheduled for Mesa City Council Redistricting
July 21, 2021 at 1:18 pmEvery ten years, local governments, including the City of Mesa, use new census data to redraw their City Council district lines to reflect how local populations have changed. Mesa's nonpartisan Redistricting Commission, a five-member panel created by mandate of the City Charter, has scheduled a series of public workshops to get input from our residents:
> Thursday, Aug. 12 at 6 p.m.
Webster Recreation Center, 202 N. Sycamore
> Saturday, Aug. 14 at 10 a.m.
Fire Station 218, 845 N. Alma School Road
> Tuesday, Aug. 17 at 6 p.m.
Eagles Community Center, 828 E. Broadway Road
> Wednesday, Aug. 18 at 12 p.m.
Red Mountain Library, 635 N. Power Road
> Wednesday, Aug. 25 at 6 p.m. - Virtual Zoom meeting (link coming soon)
> Thursday, Aug. 26 at 6 p.m.
Cadence Community Room, 9760 E. Cadence Parkway
> Saturday, Aug. 28 at 10 a.m.
Madison Elementary, 849 S. Sunnyvale
All of the public workshops will have translation services in Spanish.
We are also asking the public to identify their communities using DistrictR, an online public mapping tool at https://districtr.org/tag/mesaaz. This allows you to share how you think city council districts should be drawn to best represent your community.
All maps submitted will be carefully reviewed by the Redistricting Commission
project has been known to insiders by a code name, “Project Red Hawk,’’ for more than a year because Mesa signed a confidentiality agreement. 
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