One of the most dramatic cases of prison-based gerrymandering is about to be fixed.<\/p>\n
Here’s what was wrong:<\/p>\n
When Livingston County, New York drew new county legislative districts after the 2000 Census, all of the people incarcerated in the town of Groveland were used to make up a whopping 64% of the town’s political clout in county government. This was bad news for everyone who didn’t live in Groveland because it meant that every 4 people who live in the town with the prison had as much say in county government as 10 people who live elsewhere in Livingston County.<\/p>\n
The Chair of the Livingston County legislature, who represents the town padded with the prison populations, told the New York Times<\/a> that he doesn’t really represent the incarcerated people to whom he owes the bulk of his say in county affairs, explaining, \u201cWe don\u2019t campaign; they don\u2019t vote.\u201d<\/p>\n Fast forward to today:<\/p>\n Thanks to the 2010 law<\/a> that ended prison-based gerrymandering in New York, all Livingston County residents will enjoy equal access to the county legislature. This is because, as the Erie County Attorney General has affirmed<\/a>, the law ending prison-based gerrymandering applies to both New York state legislative districts and and local government districts.<\/p>\n A recent Livingston County News article<\/a> reports that now that the plaintiffs who sued<\/a> to bring back prison-based gerrymandering have given up the case<\/a>, the county will proceed with re-weighting the county voting system to reflect the people who actually call Livingston County home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Thanks to the 2010 law that ended prison-based gerrymandering in NY, Livingston County’s democracy will no longer be distorted by prison populations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-5368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5368\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5368"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonersofthecensus.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=5368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}