County mappers deny claims of gerrymandering

BY CLAYTON FRANKE

The Bulletin

The process of creating district maps for the Deschutes County Commission has been contentious from the start. But this week was the first time opponents made explicit claims that the maps were rigged to favor Republican-leaning candidates.

“We have been delivered gerrymandered maps that provide disproportionate partisan advantage in forthcoming elections,” Deschutes County Commissioner Phil Chang said during a board meeting Nov. 17. “It runs fundamentally counter to the directions that we gave to the (committee).”

Gerrymandering is when electoral maps are drawn to favor one party or another. Deschutes County is drawing new district maps as feuds over congressional maps continue in states across the country.

Chang has been highly critical of the districting effort that had the county’s two other commissioners, Patti Adair and Tony DeBone, in control of the process. They made a majority of appointments to the mapping committee. Those appointments approved the proposed map 4-3 with objections from Chang’s appointments.

Adair and DeBone are Republicans and Chang is a Democrat, although county commission elections are technically nonpartisan.

D emocrats, who supported the board’s expansion to five members and have a chance to flip the majority in 2026, argued that districting should occur at a later date.

On Monday Chang said the board “baked in a partisan power grab into this process. We should not be surprised that this is the map this group produced.”

Experts weigh in

The Bulletin compiled voter data by precinct to see how each of the proposed districts voted in the 2024 presidential election. Four-fifths of registered voters in Deschutes County participated in that election, and about 53% of them voted for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris. About 43% voted for Republican candidate Donald Trump.

But Trump received more votes than Harris in three of of five districts on the proposed map, according to The Bulletin’s analysis.

In the two districts that essentially split Bend into east and west, Harris would have won by anywhere from 27 to 48 percentage points. Despite falling to Harris by 13,258 votes in Deschutes County overall, Trump would have won the district covering Sisters and reaching around into northeast Bend by about 2%, a district covering south-county and reaching up into southeast Bend by a little less than 6% and a district covering the greater Redmond area by 18%.

While the 2024 results indicate an edge for Republicans, the Sisters and south county districts are still “potentially competitive” given the close margins and the fact voters don’t always stick with party preference at the local level, said Samuel

Wang, director of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, a group of professors and analysts that evaluate redistricting efforts across the country.

“This map does give some advantage to Republicans, but it could have been worse,” Wang said in an email.

Additional tinkering, he said, could make the districts close in population and political affiliation.

Jonathan Cervas, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University also with the gerrymandering project, agreed. He said Democrat voters are “packed” into the two Bend districts, but other districts are still “pretty competitive.”

In Bend, registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by about 28,000 to 15,000. In the rest of the county, Republicans outnumber Democrats 29,000 to 20,000. About one-third of voters are non-affiliated.

‘Let the chips fall where they may’

The mapping committee specifically chose not to look at party voter data in order to avoid bias, said Matt Cyrus, a Sisters rancher who served on the committee. The group took a 4-3 vote not to include party data in its second-tolast meeting, and in its final meeting, the county’s attorney advised doing so would present a greater legal risk.

The final decision between two maps came down to decisions about a handful of voter precincts on the edges of Bend. Cyrus said it made more sense to group southwest Bend and the Broken Top golf resort into a district with the rest of west Bend. group southeast Bend with La Pine the rest of south county, and group the northeast fringe of Bend with the Sisters district.

Cyrus said he was focused on grouping together similar communities. The committee looked at overlays of demographic data, building permits, school districts, fire districts, road districts and other jurisdictions. The committee went with “the cleanest lines that made the most sense.”

The committee met 11 times for two hours over the past several months and hosted a two hour listening session for the public.

“What we came up with is the fairest map that we could come up with that represents each distinct portion of the county, represents each city, and kind of let the chips fall where they may as far as what the political affiliations are in those districts,” Cyrus said.

The recommended map will be presented to county commissioners at the board meeting on Dec. 3. DeBone and Adair both said they likely won’t open the proposed map back up for changes. Their approval would place the map and a measure creating districts on the May 2026 ballot. Districts would not take effect until 2028.

█ Reporter: 541-617-7854, clayton. franke@bendbulletin.com