Foes say Missouri ballot plan allows partisan gerrymandering

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — A Republican ballot proposal seeking to reverse key parts of Missouri's recently adopted redistricting method could allow some of the most gerrymandered voting districts in the nation while still purporting to provide “partisan fairness,” opponents of the measure said Thursday.

A proposed constitutional amendment placed on the November ballot by the GOP-led Legislature would change the criteria for redrawing state House and Senate districts in 2021 based on the results of this year's census.

Among other things, it would shift a requirement that districts be drawn to achieve “partisan fairness” and “competitiveness" from the top of the priority list to the bottom, placing it behind criteria for compact districts that keep communities intact.

The fairness and competitiveness criteria were part of a 2018 constitutional amendment called “Clean Missouri” that won 62% of the vote. It made Missouri the first state to require use of a specific formula called the “efficiency gap” to measure partisan fairness.

Under that formula, a score near zero is considered politically neutral. The 2018 measure requires a nonpartisan state demographer to draft districts “as close to zero as practicable." The measure on this year's ballot does away with that demographer and allows an efficiency gap up to 15%, which could allow districts to heavily favor one party over another.

"Instead of trying to create fair maps for Missouri voters, it enshrines extreme partisan gerrymandering,” said Chris Lamar, a redistricting attorney at the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that has challenged voting districts in several states as illegal gerrymanders.

Republican state Sen. Dan Hegeman has said the “partisan fairness” criteria in 2018 measure could result in elongated...