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NY Rep. Ritchie Torres Demands More Public Input for Redistricting 

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By: Ilana Siyance

The map redistricting by the court’s special master has upset Democrats in congress.

As reported by the NY Daily News, Bronx Rep. Ritchie Torres has proposed a new bill, which would make sure the public gets more input the next time there’s a redistricting.  Torres’ suggested legislation would require multiple public hearings with online access anytime an entity other than a state legislature creates new congressional districts.  Torres said the controversial new districting “ran roughshod over communities of color.”

The bill was proposed in response to the new redistricting in New York State, which radically shakes up old districts and has created disarray for Democratic incumbents, which are in some cases pitted against each other.  The maps were created to replace the ones drawn up by Democrats, which were deemed in court as “unconstitutionally drawn with political bias”.  As per the NY Times, democrats in state legislature were accused and found guilty of gerrymandering, with ambitions to potentially pick up several seats in the House of Representatives by redrawing the maps.  Republicans had fought the maps in court, leading NYS Supreme Court judge Justice Patrick F. McAllister, to appoint 37-year-old mapmaker Jonathan Cervas from Pittsburgh to redraw the maps. Cervas’ new maps make it highly likely that the upcoming general-election campaigns will be very competitive, and Democrats now run the risk of losing their long-time comfortable majority.

Democrats in congress oppose the finalized maps and object to the process of reviewing them.  “The final map was the fruit of a poisonous tree and for evidence, look no further than the Bronx, which serves as a microcosm of what went wrong statewide,” said Torres.  He noted that the South Bronx, which he represents and which is primarily Latino, was a single district that has now been divided into three different districts. Also the primarily Black Northeast section of the Bronx was split into multiple districts.  Torres fumed that only one public review session was held for the map changes, and even that was in a remote upstate town of Bath.  “I had to travel a total of 10 hours to submit a few minutes of testimony,” he said. “I had never heard of, let alone traveled to Bath, N.Y., until recently.”

The House of Representative bill that Torres introduced was co-sponsored on Friday by Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat who represents parts of Brooklyn and Queens. “The unelected, out-of-town special master did a terrible job, produced an unfair map that did great violence to Black and Latino communities throughout the city, and unnecessarily detonated the most Jewish district in America,” said Jeffries, who is chairman of the House Democratic Caucus and the second-highest-ranking Black lawmaker in Congress. “The draft map released by a Judicial Overseer in Steuben County and unelected, out-of-town Special Master, both of whom happen to be white men, is part of a vicious national pattern targeting districts represented by members of the Congressional Black Caucus”, Jeffries further wrote.

Mr. Cervas, who has not aligned himself with any party and calls himself “pro-democracy,” has responded that his map “fully reflected” how NY’s main minority populations are “geographically concentrated.”

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