Nevada passes improvements to prison gerrymandering reform law
With Governor Governor Joe Lombardo's signature, and the legislature's unanimous support, the state improves its prison gerrymandering reforms.
by Aleks Kajstura, June 3, 2025
On Friday, Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo signed AB 477 into law. This bill updates Nevada’s 2019 law ending prison gerrymandering, by improving data collection and providing clearer guidelines for implementation. It passed both the House and Senate unanimously, continuing the emerging bipartisan trend of support for prison gerrymandering reform.
Prison gerrymandering is a problem created because the Census Bureau incorrectly counts incarcerated people as residents of their prison cells rather than their home communities. As a result, when states use Census data to draw new state or local districts, they inadvertently give residents of districts with prisons greater political clout than all other state residents.
The new bill requires the Department of Corrections to collect and maintain address records, age, and race and ethnicity data used in redistricting. That means the state will have the data it needs to implement the law already on hand by the time the 2030 Census arrives. And the bill gives clearer guidance to the State Demographer on how to handle missing address information and out-of-state residents when adjusting the redistricting data to end prison gerrymandering. Missing data is unfortunately quite common despite states’ best efforts (for example, because the federal Bureau of Prisons refuses to share address information with home states), so implementation is easier when data gaps are anticipated and planned for in advance.
The state passed prison gerrymandering reform in 2019, shortly before the last redistricting cycle. This meant that the state had a short time to implement the law, and struggled in doing so particularly because it didn’t already have all of the address records it needed to count incarcerated people at home. In the end, the state managed to count about 64% of people in state prisons as residents of their home addresses, a great success given the limitations of its existing data, but the second-lowest success rate of the states that went through the same legislative reform process.
It’s not unusual for states to make improvements to their prison gerrymandering reforms. For example, California and Illinois have both updated their legislation to improve the home address data collection. The improvements that just passed in Nevada will ensure that the state’s implementation of prison gerrymandering reform is on par with its peers going forward.
The unanimous bipartisan support for this bill in the legislature and the Republican Governor’s signature show that states that end prison gerrymandering see the benefits of equal representation for all of their residents. In addition to Nevada, eighteen other states — including “red” states like Montana, “blue” states like New York, and “purple” states like Maine — have recognized the impact of prison gerrymandering on political representation and have taken action to provide more equal representation to their residents. Progress on this issue has been so swift that the staunchly bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures recently called the movement to end prison gerrymandering “the fastest-growing trend in redistricting.”
As states like Nevada continue to improve their methods for ending prison gerrymandering, this victory is yet another reason for the Census Bureau to finally change how it counts incarcerated people and end prison gerrymandering nationwide.
