Mapping New York's Future

Mapping New York's Future

The New York State Senate is committed to a fair, objective and transparent 2011-2012 legislative redistricting process. Procedures are being considered to advance the goals of a legislative redistricting plan incorporating clearly stated goals and criteria.

As the post 2010 redistricting cycle approaches, your views and opinions are welcome. The Senate is considering how objective criteria should be followed to ensure that the redistricting plan presented to the Governor for approval meets objective standards that seek to minimize regional bias and disparate population deviation, generally avoid irregularly shaped districts, provide for reasonable compactness, and comply with the goals and requirements of the federal Voting Rights Act, the New York State Constitution and legal recent legal precedents.

Public meetings are scheduled in December to solicit public input. These public meetings follow a series of earlier roundtable discussions convened with key redistricting stakeholders including representativess from the voting/civil rights, faith based and bar association communities, academia, and “good government” /reform organizations.

Senate goals for redistricting include:

• make redistricting data available to the public;
• minimize population deviation and end regional bias in redistricting;
• preserve the jurisdictional integrity of counties and most towns, as required by the State Constitution.
• maintain better district contiguity and compactness
• protect communities of interest;
• ends prison-based gerrymandering.

You can read more about this initiative here.