Challenge to Tampa Bay Senate seat revisits how it was created in 2022
Day Three of the federal lawsuit alleging that a Tampa Bay area state Senate district was racially gerrymandered focused in part on how that district was created in 2022.
The suit, filed by the ACLU of Florida and the Civil Rights & Racial Justice Clinic at New York University on behalf of three residents of Tampa and St. Petersburg, alleges the Legislature packed Black voters into District 16 to reduce their influence in nearby District 18, in violation of their equal-protection rights.
Democrat Darryl Rouson serves in SD 16, while Republican Nick DiCeglie is the incumbent in SD 18.
The defendants are Senate President Ben Albritton and Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd, and their attorneys began their defense on Wednesday, bringing Jay Ferrin back to the witness stand in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida in Tampa.
Ferrin is now a senior adviser to the Florida Senate, but he served as staff director of the Florida Senate Committee on Reapportionment in the fall of 2021, when the districts lines were created. He discussed how he and his staff went about drawing up the Senate districts that year and the guidelines they followed.
The reapportionment process beginning that fall was taking place under the guidance of Ray Rodrigues, who chaired the Senate Reapportionment Committee.
Defense attorneys aired several Florida Channel video excerpts on Wednesday showing Rodrigues explaining how 'hard lessons were learned' following the Florida Supreme Court's decision in 2015 to throw out the GOP-controlled Legislature's maps after deeming them unlawful under the Fair Districts constitutional amendments adopted by voters in 2010.
Rodrigues was insistent that he wanted the 2022 Legislature to conduct itself in such a fashion that the courts would not reject the maps lawmakers would produce.
'This map will withstand a court challenge,' Rodrigues declared on the floor of the Senate.
That's what the trial taking place this week will ultimately determine.
Ferrin testified that, after his staff created other Senate districts in the Tampa Bay area, there remained about 100,000 residents in Pinellas County who would have to be inserted into another Senate district.
(With the population of Florida in 2021 at 21.5 million people, Ferrin said, his staff were tasked to draw approximately 538,438 voters into each of the 40 Senate districts).
The resultant SD 16, which encompasses parts of St. Petersburg and Hillsborough County, is similar to the 'benchmark' map created in 2015 that was then known as Senate District 19. Ferrin denied that he was instructed to maintain that same configuration.
He also said that under the rules promulgated by Rodrigues, he and his fellow staffers could speak about any new maps only with either the Senate's general counsel or other Senate members — and not the general public. He was not supposed to review public submissions.
Florida senators were allowed to propose amendments during the reapportionment process, to add their own maps. Rodrigues and Democratic Sen. Audrey Gibson had filed such amendments, Ferrin said, but no senator had asked him to directly to create any Senate maps.
ACLU attorney Nicholas Warren said at the beginning of the morning that he had sought to depose Rodrigues and fellow Republican and committee member Danny Burgess before the trial, but both had asserted legislative privilege, which shields them having to testify in certain lawsuits.
In the afternoon, the defense called two expert witnesses who criticized the expert witness testimony and voting analysis that came from the plaintiffs on Tuesday.
Steven Voss is a political science professor at the University of Kentucky. When asked to break down the political partisanship of the Tampa Bay area, he included four counties that make up the Tampa Bay metropolitan statistical area — Hillsborough, Pinellas, Polk and Hernando.
Based on population, he said, five Senate districts could be folded into the area, and that three historically were reliably Republican while two would favor Democrats. Currently, that breakdown is four Republican districts and one Democratic — with Senate District 14, which Voss said historically favored Democrats, going to the GOP in 2022.
Voss took aim at the alternative voting maps produced for the ACLU by Penn State University professor of statistics Cory McCartan. Those maps showed that a district could have been fairly drawn up exclusively in Hillsborough County while still protecting Tier-1 standards there and in Pinellas County.
(That involves the Florida Constitution's Fair District Amendment, which says that districts shall not be drawn with the intent or result of denying or abridging the equal opportunity of racial or language minorities to participate in the political process or diminish their ability to elect representatives of their choice).
Voss said that the result of McCartan's work was that he was 'cracking and packing' voters in his maps to ultimately help Democrats at the voting booth.
Sean Trende, senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics, also testified for the defense. He praised the composition of the Senate maps passed by the Legislature in 2022, saying it was 'pretty incompetent racial gerrymandering, if that's what's going on.'
The trial is expected to conclude on Thursday.
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