Drawing Lines: The Future of Redistricting in America
Drawing Lines: The Future of Redistricting in America
February 26, 2010 ~ Duke University School of Law
CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS and SCHEDULE
Panel One:
Is There a Way to Design an Apolitical Redistricting Process?
9:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Moderator
Michael Crowell – Professor Crowell is professor of public law and government at UNC Chapel Hill’s School of Government. Before coming to UNC he was in private practice in Raleigh and represented over 75 boards of county commissioners, city councils and school boards in voting rights and redistricting matters. He has drawn many compact districts and many bug splats. His other election litigation included representation of the Democratic National Governors Association, the Libertarian Party and Pat Buchanan.
Presenters
Justin Buchler – Dr. Buchler is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Case Western Reserve University, where he studies redistricting and the effects of competitive elections on political institutions. His book, Hiring and Firing Public Officials: Rethinking the Purpose of Elections, is under contract and being revised for Oxford University Press. He has also written several papers on a variety of topics, including campaign finance, voting technology, the use of spatial models to study elections, and the role of party influence on position-taking.
Steven Huefner – Professor Huefner is a Senior Fellow of Election Law at Moritz at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law, where he is also Director of Clinical Programs and Director of the Moritz Legislation Clinic. Prior to joining the faculty at Moritz, Professor Huefner spent five years in the U.S. Senate’s Office of Senate Legal Counsel, where his responsibilities included advising the U.S. Senate in matters of contested Senate elections, as well as assisting in the 1999 presidential impeachment trial. As Director of the Legislation Clinic at Moritz, Professor Huefner has studied many aspects of Ohio’s electoral processes, including campaign finance law, lobbying regulation, other campaign practices, legislative term limits, and the initiative and referendum processes of direct democracy. He is co-author of the 2007 book From Registration to Recounts: The Election Ecosystems of Five Midwestern States.
Jeff Reichert – Mr. Reichert is the Writer and Director of Gerrymandering––a new documentary film examining redistricting. He recently served as Senior Vice President of Magnolia Pictures where he developed release campaigns for some of the most theatrically successful documentaries in recent years including the Academy Award-nominated Capturing the Friedmans, Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room, Jesus Camp and No End in Sight, and the Academy Award-winner Man on Wire. He is the co-founder and editor of the popular online film journal Reverse Shot.
Respondents
Bobby Bowers – Mr. Bowers is the longtime Director of the South Carolina Budget and Control Board’s Office of Research and Statistics. Among its other duties, the ORS is responsible for documenting the various election districts and voting precincts in South Carolina, providing technical assistance for digital mapping, and developing and modifying legislative plans for political districts. Mr. Bowers has considerable experience with redistricting litigation: he has served as a court-appointed technical advisor for federal courts in South Carolina and Texas and for the state supreme court of New Hampshire. In Florida and Georgia he has testified as an expert witness in federal redistricting cases, and in North Carolina he has drawn district lines and participated in mediation disputes. Mr. Bowers currently chairs the South Carolina Complete Count Committee.
Bob Phillips – Mr. Phillips has served as executive director of Common Cause North Carolina since 2001. His work includes both lobbying the legislature and building statewide grassroots campaigns for a variety of good government reforms. CCNC has been a leading advocate for lobbying and ethics reform, a same day voter registration bill, and a new law to provide full public financing for statewide judges and other statewide offices. CCNC was also a key player in the state’s 2005 voter verified paper trail law, now considered one of the nation’s best. Phillips is a North Carolina native, a graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill and worked as a broadcast journalist in Raleigh and a press secretary for Lieutenant Governor Dennis Wicker before leading Common Cause.
Luncheon
11:45 – 1:00 PM
Keynote Speaker
Heather Gerken – Professor Gerken is one of the country’s leading experts on voting rights, election law, and diversity and democracy. She is the J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where she specializes in election law, constitutional law, and civil procedure. Following completion of her J.D., she clerked first for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the Ninth Circuit and later for Justice Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court. Professor Gerken’s proposal to create a Democracy Index—discussed in her book The Democracy Index: Why Our Election System is Failing and How to Fix It—has been put into bills by Senators Obama and Clinton and Representative Israel, has been the subject of a conference, and is currently being implemented in New York City and India
Panel Two:
How Will Computers Be Used in the Next Round of Redistricting?
1:15 – 2:15 PM
Presenters
Micah Altman – Dr. Altman is Senior Research Scientist in the Institute for Quantitative Social Science in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University and Archival Director of the Henry A. Murray Research Archive. Dr. Altman conducts research in social science informatics, social science research methodology, and American politics, focusing on the intersection of information, technology, and politics; and on the dissemination, preservation, and reliability of scientific knowledge. His current research interests include survey quality; computationally reliable and efficient statistical methods; the collection, sharing, citation and preservation of research data; the creation and analysis of networks of scientific knowledge; and computational methods of redistricting. Dr. Altman's work has been recognized by the Supreme Court, Forbes, and by Who's Who in America. And his over forty-two publications and five open-source software packages span informatics, statistics, computer science, political science, and other social-science disciplines.
Mark Salling – Dr. Salling is the Director of the Northern Ohio Data and Information Service and a Levin College Fellow at Cleveland State University. At CSU he manages a team of researchers, programmers, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Specialists, and student employees involved in data dissemination, demographic analysis, and urban and GIS applications. He is also the State of Ohio’s Liaison to the Census Bureau for its redistricting data programs as well as the Chairman of the Cleveland Census Statistical Areas Committee. Dr. Salling is a past board member of the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association and currently serves on the Core Committee of GISCorps, which places volunteer GIS professionals with non-profit and governmental agencies serving humanitarian needs worldwide.
Panel Three – What is the Future of the Majority-Minority District?
2:30 – 4:30 PM
Moderator
Guy Charles – Professor Charles is the founding director of the Duke Law Center on Law, Race and Politics. He is an expert in and frequent public commentator on constitutional law, election law, campaign finance, redistricting, politics, and race. He joined Duke Law's faculty in 2009, leaving his previous appointment as the Russell M. and Elizabeth M. Bennett Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School.
Presenters
Melissa Michelson – Dr. Michelson is a visiting faculty fellow at the Stanford University Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity for 2009-2010 and Associate Professor of Political Science at California State University, East Bay. From 2006-2009, she was principal investigator for the evaluation of the James Irvine Foundation’s California Votes Initiative, a multi-year effort to increase voting rates among voters in low-income and ethnic communities in California’s San Joaquin Valley and targeted areas in Southern California. Her current projects include a book-length manuscript describing the findings from the CVI, as well as additional field experiments aimed at increasing voter turnout among low-propensity communities. Her two major strands of research include Latino political incorporation and field experiments in voter mobilization. She has published extensively in these fields, including most recently a piece in the Journal of Politics, "Heeding the Call," which describes the power of two-round phone banks to increase turnout.
Luis Fuentes-Rohwer – Dr. Fuentes-Rohwer earned his J.D. and Ph. D. from the University of Michigan and is currently professor of law at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law. His research interests focus on way that institutions—especially the courts—are asked to craft and implement the ground rules of American politics. Much of his scholarship involves the intersection of race and democratic theory as reflected in the law of democracy in general and the Voting Rights Act in particular. Professor Fuentes-Rohwer’s most recent work examines the political and constitutional status of the commonwealth of Puerto Rico under American rule.
Respondents
Adam Cox – Professor Cox joined the faculty of the University of Chicago School of Law in 2004. His research and teaching interests include voting rights, election law, immigration law, constitutional law, and federal jurisdiction and procedure. After completing his J.D. in 1999, Cox clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and then served as a Karpatkin Civil Rights Fellow for the American Civil Liberties Union. He also practiced for a time at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering.
Bill Gilkeson – Mr. Gilkeson is a staff attorney in the Research Division of the North Carolina General Assembly. He had an extensive career in journalism before completing his law degree at UNC Chapel Hill in 1985. Since that time he has worked for the Research Division, where he specializes in election law, redistricting, employment law, and First Amendment law. He was intimately involved in the redistricting work of the 1990s and 2000s, including the redistricting plans that were the subject of Shaw v. Reno and the plans contested in Stephenson v. Bartlett and Bartlett v. Strickland. Mr. Gilkeson has twice served as an officer of the Redistricting and Elections Committee of the National Conference of State Legislatures.
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