Redistricting in Rhode Island is not touched by or tainted by politics and legalized corruption – it is marinating in it. All incumbent state legislators are offered what amounts to a special and exclusive service that allows them to choose their voters. Some accept this service, some do not, but very few speak openly about it.

The process in Rhode Island is run, as it has been for decades, by a commission of sitting and former legislators representing both major political parties, and a small number of people who currently do not hold office. Every commission member is handpicked by the Senate President and the Speaker of the House. Assisting the commission is a consultant, in this case Kimball Brace of Election Data Services.

The process of redistricting is bounded by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and a Supreme Court ruling, Reynolds v Sims, that ruled that state legislative districts must be roughly equal (give or take 5%) in population. The Voting Rights Act ensures that racial minorities and Latinx populations are not discriminated in the process of redistricting.

That’s it. Every other consideration is set by the state – in this case the enabling legislation, H6222, submitted in the House by Speaker Joseph Shekarchi. The state laws adds a few more legally binding constraints on redistricting:

• Congressional and state legislative districts should be as compact in territory as possible and should reflect natural, historical, geographical, municipal and other political lines and communities of interest.
• To the extent practicable, congressional and state legislative districts should be composed of contiguous territory, that is, not crossing bodies of water or divided by other districts.

All other factors taken into consideration during redistricting are in what Kimball Brace calls the “kitchen sink.” Mind you, not all considerations in the kitchen sink are enumerated, or publicly known. Some, such as taking into account the home addresses of incumbents to ensure that do not find themselves outside their present districts, have only been recently revealed. As Kimball Brace told UpriseRI, “Anybody involved with redistricting knows that incumbency is one of the things that can be a factor…”

Incumbency is not listed anywhere in the enabling legislation, and was never mentioned as a factor during any of the over one dozen meetings of the Redistricting Commission. It, and perhaps many other unknown and unstated rules, are in the kitchen sink, ready to be used at the discretion of Kimball Brace in the service of entrenched General Assembly leadership.

What does this look like in action?

Every State Senator and Representative has been offered the opportunity to meet with a staff member of Election Data Services in special offices located in the basement of the Rhode Island State House. Reporters are not allowed entry into these offices, Kimball Brace told UpriseRI, only legislators and staff. One legislator told Uprise RI that the office is “nice” and has really good computers with large screens upon which the district maps are displayed.

These meetings are ostensibly about learning from legislators, the “experts on their neighborhoods” as Brace describes them, what the boundaries of their neighborhood should look like.

Upon entering the State House offices of Election Data Services a legislator is shown a map of their district, with their home address highlighted on the screen. If that address needs to be updated, it is. Legislators are then told that their district boundaries have to grow or shrink, depending on United States Census data. Legislators are then asked which neighborhoods or streets it makes sense to add or subtract.

Brace admits that, “a person that has run before and been challenged and was successful in their run would probably still remember where [the challenger] lived. You can’t do away with that memory on that side…” In other words, a legislator is free at this point to use the results of their last couple of elections to solidify their hold on a district.

As the legislator and the Election Data Services representative talk, the maps are altered in real time. No notes are kept about the conversation, to the knowledge of the legislators. The meetings are not public, so what is discussed is not known. Uprise RI has issued an Access to Public Records Act request to get a log of what legislators visited the office, when, and for how long – which is all that can be legally released about these meetings. The General Assembly, which wrote the law governing Access to Public Records, has made such notes, even if they were kept, unavailable to the public.

Via this process legislators are able to cut out neighborhoods where they might have performed poorly, or even move a potential challenger out of district, as was alleged at the Redistricting Commission hearing in Smithfield on Monday evening by many voters during public comment.

A few legislators, most notably the newly elected District 4 Senator Samuel Zurier, turned down the opportunity to move the boundaries of their district, opining that voters should pick their representatives, not the other way around. Ryan Taylor, an employee of Election Data Services, confirmed that a few legislators made the same value judgement.

But even Zurier, who was presented with two potential redistricting maps maps, made it known what map he preferred.

Other legislators told Uprise RI that when given the opportunity to add or cut streets or neighborhoods they made suggestions as to which ones they wanted to gain or lose. Most of these suggestions were incorporated into one or both of the potential redistricting maps.

Protecting incumbents

The issue cuts deeper than protecting incumbents. Once hired by General Assembly leadership, Kimball Brace made frequent trips to Rhode Island to meet with General Assembly leadership and staff. These meetings are almost all “off the books” in the sense that no notes were kept and the existence of these meetings was not generally known. Meeting in person – in hotel rooms and expensive local restaurants – kept these meetings from taking place via email or phone. Brace, an extremely intelligent person, kept the information conveyed in his head, not in the form of notes that might find their way into the hands of some reporter who might call the process a sham.

Kimball Brace has been consulting on redistricting in Rhode Island for decades. Ten and twenty years ago the basement offices loaned to Election Data Services would be filled with printed maps upon which changes could be highlighted. The advent of modern computers has made he process much more efficient, and requires less destruction of working notes and maps.

For the 2021 round of redistricting Kimball Brace was hired by [former] Speaker Nicholas Mattiello and Senate President Dominick Ruggerio. Speaker Mattiello was vested in preserving the racist prison gerrymandering he benefitted from in District 15, but with Mattiello voted out of office the issue of prison gerrymandering could be raised and even come to prominence. Early on in the hearings Kimball Brace was quick to say that little could be done about prison gerrymandering on so short a timeline, but as advocates pointed out, Pennsylvania was doing so, and that state is much larger in population and has more prisons. At one recent Brace falsely claimed that there was a lawsuit against the Pennsylvania Redistricting Commission to prevent that body from addressing prison gerrymandering. It turned out, as Common Cause Rhode Island Executive Director John Marion said at a later meeting, that such a lawsuit doesn’t exist.

Is it possible that Brace is protecting the former Speaker’s district, even though Mattiello isn’t around anymore? Protecting the districts of Speakers is a time honored tradition, as is protecting the districts of Senate Presidents. Lenny Cioe, who challenged Senate President Dominick Ruggerio last election alleges that his supporters were cut out his district. Though being outspent more than 25 to 1, Cioe mounted a credible challenge to the Senate President. When the redistricting maps were released Cioe found that all the neighborhoods that he won in the last election are no longer in his district, while all the neighborhoods that went to the Senate President were preserved. The Senate President gerrymandered his next election said Cioe, and as we have seen above, the process to do so is easy and available.

Grand Theft Democracy

In the last election progressive challengers made real electoral gains. But when they did so, they did so on maps that were nearly ten years out of date in the sense that they were created to protect incumbents. These weakened maps may have given challengers the slight advantage they needed to win. Now the maps are about to be refortified in favor of incumbents, and as a result we might expect to see future challenger victories more difficult to attain.

The process of redistricting in Rhode Island is corrupt on a molecular level, and has been for the entire lifetimes of voters under the age of 40. All voters in our state are victims of a crime – Grand Theft Democracy – perpetuated by the very people we trust to write the laws.

[Pictured: [former] Representative Steven Ucci who chaired the Redistricting Commission in 2011, shakes hands with Senator Stephen Archambault, who co-chairs the 2021 Redistricting Commission with Representative Robert Phillips (adjusting his nameplate.)]