COLUMBIA — When the South Carolina Senate’s redistricting committee released renderings of its proposed new map earlier in November, the results were met with a collective easy shrug by lawmakers and members of the public alike.
Advocacy groups closely monitoring the process — the American Civil Liberties Union, the South Carolina League of Women Voters — offered little objection. And members of the committee, including Democratic Sen. Dick Harpootlian, whose district would be eliminated by the plan, advanced it out of committee after less than 20 minutes of discussion.
Initial discussions around the House of Representatives’ plan, released the afternoon of Nov. 8, would not go so smoothly.
Meeting to discuss the maps for the first time on Nov. 10, the eight members of the House redistricting committee faced several hours of constituent testimony and criticism that the 124 districts — as drawn — discouraged competition, divided communities of interest, and were released with insufficient time to allow for informed public comment.
Opposition came from both sides of the political aisle.
Numerous Orangeburg residents testified against the elimination of the historically Black House District 95, a predominantly Democratic district that had been carved off into more rural, conservative districts currently represented by incumbents outside the city’s limits.
Conservatives in the adjacent communities of Allendale, Bamberg, and Barnwell objected as well, concerned the Republican-leaning vote could be diluted with Democratic voters.
Another predominantly minority community in Anderson appeared to have been divided into three separate districts, a questionable decision that could potentially marginalize the vote of the local Black population, others said.
“We are basically being eliminated,” said Rosa W. Kennerly-Dance, an Orangeburg resident who opposed the plan.
Some of the proposed districts, critics alleged, had been drawn in ways that heavily favored incumbents, occasionally dividing individual precincts into distinct districts to do so. While a proposal by the League of Women Voters split just 82 precincts, the House proposal would divide 371 different precincts statewide — far more than the estimated 123 needed to ensure all individual House districts had equal shares of population.
In the House plan’s effort to keep populations between districts, critics said, the plan could potentially marginalize large minority populations that were undercounted by the census. While the House allowed for deviations of 2.5 percent from the state average, some have pushed for deviations as high as 5 percent, a nod to analyses by groups like the Urban Institute arguing minority populations can often be undercounted at significantly higher proportions than Whites.
On its face, the House proposal represented an “extreme gerrymander,” S.C. League of Women Voters Vice President Lynn Teague said, with the potential to dilute the votes of approximately 250,000 South Carolinians. Numerous critics of the plan, including Teague, said they had not had enough time to say so authoritatively.
Redistricting this year has been a challenge. South Carolina’s population grew nearly 11 percent over the past decade, fueled primarily by lopsided growth along the coast, in the South Carolina suburbs of Charlotte, and in the region surrounding Greenville. Due to COVID-19, population numbers for individual precincts were delayed until midsummer, prompting delays in the redistricting process that prompted lawsuits from groups like the ACLU and the South Carolina NAACP.
Other gaffes didn’t help the process. After the House released its initial plan online on Nov. 8, the proposal was briefly removed from the committee’s website only to be reposted with a different, updated map hours later. Committee chairman Rep. Jay Jordan told attendees the mishap was a technical error. However, several to testify on Nov. 10 said the mishap, paired with the brief amount of time between the map’s release and the meeting itself, said they had less than a single business day to develop informed testimony ahead of the hearing.
This was concerning, Teague said, because the House map, as proposed, appeared to be statistically biased, with district borders that seemed to benefit incumbent members. Though the new maps would likely not significantly change the 81-43 Republican advantage over Democrats in the House, according to an analysis by The Associated Press, the plan did little to foster competition, Teague said. Under the House plan, just 12 districts across the state, Teague said, were likely to finish with electoral margins of 5 percent or less, compared with 19 under the League’s map.
“What we know is this map was very unlikely to have been designed without a very biased goal,” she said.
“Our initial conclusion is that the League would never support this map,” she added.
The jury is still out on whether certain plans will benefit or hinder a community’s interests. The fast-growing community of Mount Pleasant, for example, shares representation with citizens of Charleston, Hanahan, Isle of Palms and Sullivan’s Island. The fractures in the map have created a situation where five members of the South Carolina House of Representatives and three members of the Senate count Mount Pleasant residents as constituents. While that dynamic potentially dilutes their influence in the Legislature, it also means more advocates for the town’s interests in Columbia.
“In theory, of course, Mount Pleasant would benefit from having a state House district comprised entirely of our citizens,” Mayor Will Haynie said in an interview. “In practice, though, we must look at how the lines are drawn and hear citizen feedback to see if the new configurations make sense for Mount Pleasant neighborhoods.”
Ultimately, lawmakers will need more time to figure that out. While the committee unanimously voted to adopt the House plan as a working document on Nov. 10, Chairman Jay Jordan, R-Florence, announced at the end of the meeting he would leave written public comment open until Nov. 15, delaying a formal vote to advance the draft proposal until the next meeting of the House Judiciary Committee. That meeting will likely take place on Nov. 16.
