I must apologize to my readers for substantial error in my post yesterday. I said that the Mayor did not have to correct errors in the precincts due to the State Legislature's creation of its new districts. That is not entirely true.
I have been trying to track down the actual genesis of the problem, but, at this point all I can say is that the State Legislature, through HB 1601, did require the Mayor Ballard to review census data on all precincts sent to him by the State's Election Division, and either submit corrections to the precincts affected, or re-precinct entirely. The bill anticipated little cost to the County, with the Legislative Services Agency stating "Explanation of Local Expenditures: County Executives- County executives should require only a minimal increase in administrative time to send the ED the information required by the bill", in its Fiscal Impact Analysis.
While I am not able to say if it was poorly drafted Legislative districts or Congressional districts (which did use census blocks instead of precincts in their legal descriptions) (see IC 2-1-12, IC 2-1-13, and IC 3-3-5, respectively) it is certain that some action regarding the evaluation and correction of precinct boundaries was legally required of Mayor Ballard.
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Mark Small posted blog posts
2 hours ago
2 comments:
Pat, I don't agree at all that the house and senate districts were somehow "poorly drafted." They used existing precincts in drafting the districts. I don't know how they could be any more clear than that. It was only the congressional districts where they sometimes used census tracks instead of precincts which could have led to split precincts. I think your apologizing when you were 95% on the mark in your earlier post.
I appreciate your support, Paul. But, I guess we all have to move to the beat of our own drummer in these matters.
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