Florida legislature struggles to untangle Census’ skewed race data

by Aleks Kajstura, August 19, 2015

“Prison population affecting Florida’s redistricting fight” in yesterday’s Miami Herald explains how the current way the Census Bureau counts incarcerated people is making it difficult for the legislature to draw functional minority opportunity districts:

The last Census counted more than 160,000 people in Florida correctional facilities, and they cannot vote. But they can skew how districts are drawn, and ultimately who represents the state in the U.S. House of Representatives. That is exactly what U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown, D-Jacksonville, is convinced is happening in North Florida.

Brown said the proposed new Congressional District 5 stretching from Jacksonville to Tallahassee will see a reduction in the percentage of black residents who are of voting age — a key measure used to ensure black voters can elect who they want to represent them in Congress — from 50 percent to 45 percent under the map that passed the House on Tuesday and is expected to be before the Senate on Wednesday.

But Brown, who is suing the Legislature to block the redrawing of her district, said the reduction of the black voting age population in her district could be even greater because her new district would have 17,000 prisoners in it — giving it one of the highest prison populations in the state. Her current district has just 10,000.

Florida is redistricting again because the Florida Supreme Court recently invalidated the current map and legislators are having a hard time disentangling Census’s detailed data on voting age and race from the Bureau’s counts of incarcerated populations. And, as the article reports, some of the attempts to increase the Black Voting Age population inadvertently relied on adding even more prisons to the proposed district:

State Sen. Audrey Gibson, D-Jacksonville, proposed a plan that would increase the black voting age population in Brown’s district to 46.6 percent. Gibson cited concerns over the prisons as one of her points of contention, yet her proposal, which is scheduled to be considered by the Senate on Wednesday, would boost the number of people incarcerated in Brown’s district to nearly 23,000.

Sen. Bill Montford, a Tallahassee Democrat, took his own shot at redrawing the district, too. But while his plan increased the black voting age population, it would have required putting almost 30,000 inmates into Brown’s district.

To make these kinds of calculations easier for map drafters, we combine the Bureau’s data on incarcerated people into accessible formats and make those available through our data page. And of course, if the Census Bureau changes their methodology to count incarcerated people where they reside in 2020, these sorts of problems will be avoided.