Winslow residents were invited to attend a presentation by Navajo County regarding redistricting last week. To begin the presentation, Navajo County Civil Deputy County Attorney Jason Moore outlined the legal aspects of the process and why it must take place.
“The supervisory districts have to change because the United States Constitution contains a principle known as, ‘one person, one vote.’ The idea is to try to create equal representation, that’s why we have to do this. We are not talking about congressional districts or legislative districts, but generally, these are redrawn for the same reason.”
The redistricting cycle coincides with the decennial census and is based on the results of that survey. Moore continued, “In order to understand where we are going, you kind of have to understand where we are coming from. Following the 2010 redistricting cycle, our smallest (in population) district was District I with 20,594 people. Our largest was District V with 22,090.”
The total Navajo County population in 2010 was 107,449. Following the 2020 census, it was determined Navajo County has a population of 106,717. A number, according to Moore that is disputed.
He said, “That is a decrease of about 1%. A lot of people disagree with this number and I am among them. It is hard accepting the idea that our county actually shrunk in population. If you look at the ground level, it is hard to accept that is a reality. However, we can’t change this number. The US Census number is what it is. There are a lot of other rural counties that feel they were undercounted as well as there were a lot of things going on during the census taking of 2020, namely COVID.”
Based on the official population count, as Moore explained, the ideal district size for all of Navajo County would be 21,343 people. However, he said, “We aren’t going to get there. It is not realistic. We do need to get to as close to that as possible. The variance allowed by an Arizona Revised Statute is up to 10% between the largest and the smallest district. Meaning, it tells us that the boundaries have to be defined equally or with not more than 10% difference in population. That is a hard and fast rule.”
According to Moore, the county’s population variance in the 2020 census numbers show District I remains the smallest and District III has become the largest district. In order to figure out the total deviation, the smallest and largest have are added and the current total deviation is 15.58%. “Therefore, we absolutely must redistrict to be in compliance with that statute.”
Another guideline regarding redistricting is adherence to the Voting Rights Act.
Moore said, “Navajo County has to draw lines in a way that does not have the purpose or the effect of diluting the voting strength of racial or language minority populations. We have to avoid retrogression in terms of minority voters.”
What that means is that the districts that are drawn cannot impair minority voters to elect candidates of their choice. This according to the Voting Rights Act and is an absolute concrete principle that cannot be violated. “Basically, three of our five county districts are what you would call minority-majority districts. When we are finished with our redistricting cycle, we need to make sure that we still end up with three minority-majority districts,” he said.
Moore explained other principles necessary for redrawing districts. He said, “The first two redistricting priorities are number one: compliance with the A.R.S. (Arizona Revised Statute) we talked about earlier regarding the 10% population deviation. Number two: the plan has to follow the Voting Rights Act as we also discussed. Then, once those concrete principles are reached, we can move on to the ideal principles.”
He explained that the redistricting plan should, to the extent feasible, be based on the existing districts. Next, the districts should be compact and composed of contiguous territory. Where possible, easily identifiable geographic boundaries should be followed and to the extent possible, incorporated municipalities should not be split.
“A consistent theme is that the population in the southern half of the county is growing faster than the population in the northern half of the county. The practical impact of what that means is that in order to get more people in District I and II, those districts had to grow geographically southward. You are going to find that will probably be true in this redistricting cycle as well.”
Moore pointed out that redrawing districts is a difficult task. One of the reasons for that is, “In some circumstances you may find that these rules can conflict each other. Sometimes, if you are doing something to follow one rule, you are breaking another.”
Therefore, he explained, “We need to do our best to follow the prioritization of these rules that has been set by our Board of Supervisors. They adopted a resolution containing these priorities and created our redistricting advisory committee (RAC) and the principles they have to follow.”
The deadline for redistricting is July 1 and the county is asking for all public input possible. Moore said, “You can participate in block level redistricting by visiting the county website and using the redistricting tool. From there, you will email your map idea to (Clerk of the Board of Supervisors) Melissa Buckley and the RAC will consider it. Keeping in mind these principles.
Moore explained that communities of interest can be a lot of things. “They can be really big, or they can be really small. A big community of interest in Navajo County is the Hopi community that you wouldn’t want to split, the same with the Navajo Nation and the White Mountain Apache. Those are big swathes of land that we don’t want to separate. Those are at the macro level. We can talk about it on the micro level too, like unincorporated cities and towns that we should avoid drawing lines through. Taking it further down than that, we would look at how we wouldn’t want to separate subdivisions. You want to avoid splitting communities with interests in common.”
Additional community meetings about redistricting will take place in to the spring, according to Moore. Those interested in participating should visit the county website at www.navajocountyaz.gov. Citizens are encouraged to submit their own maps via the website as well.
