by Peter Wagner,
July 17, 2009
Maine Regional School Unit 13 board member Josiah Wilson is calling for an end to using prison counts to distort the school board’s weighted voting system. He cites the letter [PDF] that Demos and the Prison Policy Initiative sent to the Commissioner of the Maine Department of Education, asking her to declare prison-based gerrymandering a violation of the principles of one person one vote.
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by Peter Wagner,
July 10, 2009
The voting power of Philadelphians is diluted on the state level because state and federal prisoners are counted by the U.S. Census Bureau where they are incarcerated, instead of the prisoners’ home communities in which they lived before they were incarcerated, an advocacy group has concluded.
Eight state House of Representatives districts would not meet federal “one-person, one-vote” standards if nonvoting state prisoners did not count as district residents for purposes of drawing up legislative districts, according to an analysis conducted by Prison Policy Initiative, an advocacy group based in Northampton, Mass.
That’s the lead to an excellent article, Report: Census Prisoner Count Dilutes Urban Political Clout, by Amaris Elliott-Engel in The Legal Intelligencer about our newest report Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout in Pennsylvania.
by Peter Wagner,
June 28, 2009
A state constitutional amendment [PDF] has been introduced in Wisconsin that would end prison-based gerrymandering in that state.
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by Peter Wagner,
June 26, 2009
Demos and the Prison Policy Initiative have called on [PDF] the Commissioner of the Maine Department of Education to declare prison-based gerrymandering a violation of the principles of one person one vote.
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by Peter Wagner,
June 25, 2009
The DuBois Bunche Center for Public Policy has offered “enthusiastic support” for the Prisoners of the Census Bill.
Executive Director Roger Green explained how prison gerrymandering skews both voting and legislative priorities:
“The practice of including prisoners as residents of the prison districts where they do not vote or otherwise participate is not good public policy,” Mr. Green said. “The current system is filled with inequities. It allows many men and women from urban areas to become an undeserved source of political power for legislators and distant communities to benefit from incarcerating more people for longer sentences. At the same time, it works against the very communities to which these men and women will return.”
