Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission was a 2015 United States Supreme Court case wherein the Court upheld the right of Arizona voters to remove the authority to draw election districts from the Arizona State Legislature and vest it in an independent redistricting commission./ Illustration: Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich/Art Lein /Adobe STOCK
By Jeremy Duda | Arizona Mirror
The Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission has selected the tools it will use to determine whether the new congressional and legislative districts it draws are competitive.
On Tuesday, the commission chose two metrics to determine competitiveness. One will use the results from statewide races over the past three election cycles to determine how close the average vote in a proposed district would have been, while the other will use those measurements to determine how often the proposed districts would have changed hands between Democrats and Republicans.
The commission chose a “basket” of statewide races from the past three election cycles: 2016, when Republicans won the only statewide races on the ballot in Arizona; 2020, when Democrats won all of the statewide races; and 2018, the last time Arizona’s statewide offices were up for election, which was a mix of Democratic and Republican victories.
The IRC excluded the “outlier” races of the 2016 U.S. Senate contest and 2018 gubernatorial contest, when Republicans John McCain and Doug Ducey notched double-digit victories. They also omitted elections for Corporation Commission because those races featured multiple seats that were up for grabs, with Democrats and Republicans putting up different numbers of candidates.
