Bartels appointed to N.J. redistricting committee to address census shifts

At the conclusion of each census — held every 10 years — states redraw their voting districts to ensure that each person has equal voting power.

A 10-member apportionment commission — comprising five Democrats and five Republicans — is charged by the New Jersey constitution to remap the state's 40 districts in accordance with the state's population shifts.

However, politics can make realignment decisions difficult.

"In the last three times, there has been an impasse," said David Anderson, director of professional and governmental services at New Jersey's Supreme Court. "It is relatively predictable in this day and age that [the commission] can't reach an agreement."

Predictably, the commission reached a stalemate again during this year's census, in which New Jersey's population increased by approximately nine percent.

In these situations, a non-partisan 11th member is selected as a tiebreaker.

University politics professor Larry Bartels was appointed by the N.J. Supreme Court Chief Justice Deborah Poritz to this position last Tuesday to continue where the late Woodrow Wilson School dean Donald Stokes GS '52 left off.

Stokes performed this duty during the last two redistricting procedures.

"[The Justice] searched for a person with tremendous experience on democratic and election issues," Anderson said.

"If either party got to draw the new boundaries on its own, it would probably be able to produce a significant impact in subsequent elections," Bartels said. "But since the New Jersey process includes a non-partisan 'tie-breaker,' the plan that eventually gets adopted should turn out to have less dramatic partisan effects."

Bartels — who specializes in electoral politics and voting behavior — has 30 days to devise a plan, Anderson said.

"He will either propose his own plan or adopt either the Democrat or Republican plan," Anderson said. "He must be at or about 200,000 people for each district."

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

Bartels said he plans to moderate partisan goals in favor of broader public values during the process.

"Judging from past experience, it is not unlikely that I will end up siding with one party or the other to produce a majority," Bartels said, "but that should be a majority in support of a more neutral, broadly attractive plan than either party would have adopted on its own."

In local and state elections, the margin of victory can be razor-thin , and the redistricting process potentially can have a large effect on these tight races.

Though several of the state's districts are predominantly aligned with a specific party — there were about three times as many Democrat voters as Republican voters in the 2000 election in Middlesex County — Bartels noted the possible effects on marginal areas.

"In areas that are pretty even in terms of the existing partisan balance, the effects of drawing the boundaries one way or another may be somewhat greater," Bartels noted.

"An important part of my role will be to push for an outcome in which those situations do not predominantly favor one party or the other," he added.

Bartels predicted the results would not be dramatic since the census did not convey large population shifts.

"This time, many observers seem to have anticipated that it would be necessary to move one whole district from the northern part of the state to the central suburban belt," he added, "but it turned out that the population shifts reflected in the 2000 census figures were not that dramatic, so the changes in boundaries will also be less dramatic."

Though the process relies primarily on the population shifts, Bartels must take several other issues into account.

The redistricting procedure must "respect township boundaries and other so-called communities of interest," Bartels said.

In addition, the policy must ensure a fair outcome, "in the sense that whichever party wins a majority of votes statewide is very likely to win a majority of seats in the legislature, and a larger majority the more votes it gets," he said.