(upbeat music) - In November, 2018, Michigan voters amended the constitution with the Voters Not Politicians ballot proposal, establishing a commission of citizens with exclusive authority to adopt district boundaries for the Michigan Senate, Michigan House of Representatives, and US Congress every 10 years.

13 registered voters were randomly selected, forming the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission.

It's now unveiling newly drafted legislative district maps.

We discuss the map making process with MICRC members on "West Michigan Week".

(upbeat music) Thank you for joining us on "West Michigan Week".

The Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission consists of 13 randomly selected registered voters, four affiliated Democrats, four Republicans, and five unaffiliated members convening in September of 2020.

Since then, they've been tasked with drawing up Michigan Senate, Michigan House of Representatives, and US Congress maps every 10 years.

The process removes political parties in power from the equation, giving authority to a citizen-led commission spotlighting a transparent process.

Joining us for a behind-the-scenes look at this new process is Rebecca Szetela.

She's chair of the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission, an Independent from Canton in Wayne County.

Doug Clark is an MICRC member, a Republican from Rochester Hills in Oakland County.

And Steven Lett is an Independent commission member from Interlochen in Grand Traverse County.

Thank you all for joining us and taking on this important work.

How does it make you feel, being a part of this?

- I'm really proud to be a part of it.

I've learned a lot about the process.

And I'm very glad to have been selected to be involved in doing the maps.

And it's been a good experience, my first experience in a commission type environment.

I've usually been in the business environment where we have a top-down structure, and here we've got 13 people who vote on everything.

- Rebecca, for you, you're running the show.

(chuckles) What's it been like for you?

- You know, it's an awesome responsibility.

I was very excited when I was selected.

And then about a month later, I realized the gravity of what we're doing and how important it was and felt the pressure from that.

But at this point, I think I've sort of pledged to myself and to the people of the State of Michigan to do the best job I can possibly do and recognize the responsibility that we have.

And my goal is to perform with honor and hopefully come up with some really good maps with my fellow commissioners that the people of Michigan will be happy with.

- Steven, when you stepped in, what was that like?

And what have you learned along the way?

- Well, when I got the call, I was driving down the road.

And the caller asked if I was watching for the pick, and I say, "No."

And he said, "Well, you were chosen."

And I actually kept it clean and said, "No kidding."

And then I became the first chairperson.

And so I really had no clue as to what was going to happen.

But I liked your introduction that this would be behind-the-scenes look since everything we've done has been on camera and is posted on YouTube, so it hasn't been behind the scenes.

It's all been out in the open.

And that's what we learned that we were going to do, was be open and transparent and have everything for the public to watch and see and comment on.

So it's been, as I said, a learning experience because we didn't have any clue as to what was going on.

We may still not for a lot of people, but we learned as we went, and we've done the best job we can.

- I think the diversity is what intrigues me, that you have all these different political parties coming together with one common goal.

So I guess for all of you...

I haven't used the word gerrymandering until now, but that seems to be what has prompted all of this.

So when you look at previous maps and what you've come up with, I know that there are some rules in place for drawing up the maps, but what's your takeaway when you see past maps compared to what you've been coming up with?

- Well, my experience with this commission, number one, we have been one group, not Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, but one commission.

So that was number one and decided early on.

I don't know about the other commissioners.

I know about myself and some of the other commissioners, and we really have not looked at what the past maps have been.

We didn't sit down and try to draw a district based upon what the old district had done.

- And for myself, as I've gone through this process and I sit down and look at the people on the commission, it is difficult for me to identify who's the Republicans and who's the Democrats and who's the nonpartisan people.

It's just not a factor in the way we do business.

I think I could get about 90% of them right if I had to guess today.

But as far as the maps go, I don't look at previous maps.

I'm only concentrating on the maps that fellow commissioners have put together, that we've put together together, and some that I may put together.

And we study them, we talk about them.

We have good conversations among the group on what approaches we should take.

And I think it's worked very well for us.

- Yeah, and I would add to that that the historical process the people of Michigan felt was not appropriate to represent the people, and that there was the ability to sway the maps one way or another based on partisan considerations and politics.

And I think the people clearly voted that they didn't want that.

And so I think we as a commission have worked very well to follow the criteria that were laid out for us in the constitution to make sure that we aren't drawing for political preference to one side or another, and that we're coming up with fair and transparent and open maps.

- Rebecca, you're chair.

You get the quiz here.

Because there is criteria for drawing these maps and there are seven ranked redistricting criteria, can you go through that for our viewers so they understand?

Because as you've all have mentioned, you didn't look at any of the past maps.

It seems as though it's a fresh direction and there are rules of the road to follow.

So what are those?

- So the rules of the road are number one is that we have to have equal population in compliance with the Voting Rights Act.

Number two is that the districts need to be geographically contiguous, which means they need to be connected together.

Number three is consideration of communities of interest, which are historical, economic, or some sort of characteristic that ties a group together.

The citizens get to define that.

We don't define it.

But the one important aspect is that it cannot not be a political party, so a political party is not a community of interest.

Number four is that we need to try to achieve partisan fairness in the maps, that we're not favoring or disfavoring any particular party.

Number five is that we're not favoring or disfavoring any incumbent official or any candidate for elected office.

Number six is that... Oh no, I forgot.

(laughs) Number six is that we have to take into consideration municipal, township, county boundaries.

And then number seven is that the districts need to be reasonably compact.

So I had a slight, little hiccup there, but I remembered it at the end.

(laughs) - You got it.

So who came up with the criteria?

Was it the commission or was there some other outside source?

- No, the drafters of the constitutional amendment came up with that seven-rank criteria?

- Did they miss anything?

- Commissioner Clark or Commissioner Lett, any thoughts on that?

(laughs) - No, I think they got it down pretty good.

As we finish up, I may suggest that we change the order of one or two of them.

But as Rebecca indicated, I mean, we start off with the total population and then compliance to the Voting Rights Act.

That's a federal requirement, so that's gotta be number one.

Then we drill down there on things that are important here in Michigan.

- I know you've been hitting the road lately.

You were here in Grand Rapids a few weeks ago for a public comment.

And I did receive an email today that the goal for the MICRC public hearings was to receive at least 10,000 district public comments.

You've more than doubled that through a number of different platforms where the comments have been coming in.

Total comments as of today, 21,753.

What are you learning from the public?

- We're learning that they're very passionate about their position.

So whoever shows up... And I'll limit my comments to the public meetings, but they're not significantly different from the messages in the portal.

But the people come in, and they don't have a lot of time.

We started out with two minutes and dropped that down to one minute later on.

But they were very capable of getting their point across and telling us what their community of interest was or is, as well as suggesting how to draw the maps, where to put the lines, who to include, who not to include, et cetera.

So they were a well-informed, well-spoken group.

- And we've gotten comments from many different types of groups.

The Native Americans have shown up at the last two hearings that we had.

We had the Bangladesh community show up in mass.

Believe me, they showed up 50 to 60 people and all of them spoke, and they told us what their concerns were.

When we were in Dearborn, we had a large number of Arab Americans show up, and they indicated their concerns.

And I think we've gotten a good flavor of that over the course of the state.

But the concerns were a little different here and there, but as Steve mentioned, they're passionate, passionate and very polite in getting their message across, every one of them.

- What does that tell you about our society?

I mean, it seems as though there are some challenges that we're all trying to overcome right now, but when you see whole communities coming out and are interested in this democratic process, what message does that send to you and the work that you are doing?

- I mean, I think for me, it sends a message that people are excited about this process, and that they believe in this process, and that they believe that their voices will matter and will be taken into account.

And I think that that's reflected in the maps that we've drawn because their voices and opinions do matter, and we do count on them to inform the decision-making on drawing these lines that we've been drawing.

- Drawing a map, just how long can it take to come up with one district?

What goes into that?

I mean, clearly, you've gotta go through the criteria.

I understand that, but then there... Just give me an example of some of the challenges that you will run into undoubtedly as you're putting these together.

- Well, a lot of it's discussion among the group.

For example, we saw through the comments we got from people in the state that there was a need to have the lake shore districts represented, so we had a lot of discussion on how we're gonna do that.

I mean, most of the state is lake shore, so you got the east side, and the west side, and up north, and the UP.

So we had a lot of discussion on how we were you gonna do it, and we thought through some alternatives, for example, congressional maps are too big to do that.

They get their representation because there's only 13 of them.

However, in the House districts and the state Senate districts, you've got a limited number of districts, and you can create the districts so that they represent the needs of the people in those areas.

- Found out one thing when you ask about drawing maps and putting lines on the paper, you look at districts and people would say, "Well, that district is gerrymandered."

Well, when you get down to the nitty gritty, and you have to have X number of people in a district, sometimes you have to reach out in some unusual ways, and you can look at our maps and see that, in order to pull in enough population to make it viable for the Voting Rights Act.

And that was one thing that I learned going forward.

I mean, I think I asked the same question, how hard can it be?

How long can it take to draw these maps?

You put a line on the paper and draw 'em.

It's a lot harder.

- And you can't just have these 90-degree angles.

(chuckles) It doesn't work that way.

- Yeah, you also can't... One of the comments I've seen recently and just saw again today is someone was asking why we just can't keep all of the counties whole?

Well, when you have 80 plus counties in the entire state, and maybe we're drawing a map with 13 districts, the math just isn't in our favor of being able to keep every county whole, that there are going to be splits somewhere, and those splits are drawn based on the criteria, so maybe it's Voting Rights compliance that we were focused on, or a particular community of interest, or maybe it's just simply population.

But it's just not as simple as throwing a grid on the state and hoping everything comes out in the wash.

It does take a lot more thought and discernment on where we wanna draw lines.

- Where do you run into these challenges, where within a political party, you might be watering down potential candidates in an area?

Are you getting into some of that as well, where parties themselves are saying, "Well, wait a minute.

You're diluting this process in one area, and so we're not getting fair representation."

Have there been some of those claims coming out in this process?

- I think the only time we've really experienced that was our last hearing in Detroit.

We had some maps that they looked at prior to the meeting, and they basically said, "Hey, wait a minute.

That's not what we had in mind."

And so then they explained what they had in mind.

And we've gone back, and we've redrawn some of the districts in Detroit to make it more minimal to what they want as citizens.

- But that was the citizens talking, not the Democrats, not the Republicans.

I'm sure that the Republicans and the Democrats have, at least behind the scenes, said exactly what you said.

You're diluting this district, or you're enhancing this district.

Well, certainly, that's going to happen when you start drawing these maps.

We have not had overt pressure, with one exception, to draw maps in one way or another.

- And I would add to that in terms of the partisan fairness.

When we're looking at partisan fairness as a commission, we're looking at the entire state.

We're not looking on a district-by-district level and evaluating whether a particular district that we draw leans one way or another.

We're looking at the whole state and the overall map, because the demographics of the State of Michigan are such that there are gonna be some areas that favor Republicans, and there's gonna be some areas that favor Democrats.

And so we're looking at the whole state, rather than worrying about an individual district in a particular area.

- You're not gonna satisfy everyone, right?

You're trying to satisfy as many people as possible, but somewhere those lines just...

It's gotta get tricky for you.

- Well, it does.

And one of the things that helps us a lot is that we have overlays that we can put on the map.

For example, we have an overlay where we can see where the Asian communities are in the state, and we can see where the Hispanic communities are in the state.

And so we can create districts where they have fair representation 'cause we can...

If they're geographically close, we can bundle them together.

And so we give them the opportunity to have a Hispanic representative or an Arab American representative or an Asian representative.

So I think we've done a really good job at configuring the maps to meet echo.

- And I would add to that that we do sometimes have competing interests and competing communities of interest and competing comments.

And we discuss those as a commission, and we decide how we're gonna weigh them.

And that discussion is what leads to where we put the lines, based on the feedback of both the public and of individual commissioners about what we think is appropriate and which way we're gonna balance the different information that we're receiving.

- Sounds like the overlays are huge, that you've created a number of them, which really has to help this process so you can see visually the demographics and how everything falls.

I understand that there are collaborative maps and individual maps.

Have you all come up with individual maps?

It sounds like everybody collaborates, but have each of you had that opportunity to work on an individual map?

- We have.

We haven't all submitted them, but we have worked on them.

I personally like the collaborative process a lot better than the individual process 'cause you get a really good understanding on how it was put together in the discussion among the 13 of us as we put them together.

So I think those tend to work a little better.

And we have a lot of really good discussion on those maps.

- So to that end, with one district, how many different maps can you potentially come up with as you form one district?

- Well, we started out kinda... Collaborative maps, we were going to do initially two.

We ended up doing three, so each collaborative map for the Congress, for the state House, and for the Senate have three collaborative maps.

Then Rebecca submitted...

I think you submitted one for each, did you not?

And then Commissioner Lange submitted how many?

- Think two.

- Two.

- And somebody else submitted one.

- Commissioner Kellom.

- Commissioner Kellom.

So that's 3, 4, 5, 6 more on top of the others, so we have 15 all together now, if my math is right.

- Yeah.

- And you're satis... Go ahead, Rebecca.

- Yeah, I was gonna say in terms of how many different districts could you draw, I think the possibilities are endless.

There's more than one way to draw a district.

And we could have hundreds of possibilities, but I think what we came up with are the best districts that we could draw based on the feedback that we received from the public and the constraints of the seven constitutional criteria that we have to follow.

- So now comes the... You have some deadlines.

There's this approval process that now takes place.

So the approval process, what does that look like?

- Well, right now, we're in a 45-day comment period.

I believe they've been published.

And we will vote... Well, we're gonna do four more meetings, one tomorrow, one next week, week after week, and week after that, which the public will also be invited to come in if they want and give any comments they want.

And then December 30th, we'll vote.

- Okay, take me through this vote because I've been to the website and there are some of the questions and answers here.

What happens if a majority vote can't be reached on a particular map?

- Well, you go to plan B.

(Patrick laughs) - And we don't wanna go to plan B.

(chuckles) - You gotta have two Republicans, two Democrats, and at least two Independents, and you have to have seven total to have plan A work, which is up or down vote on each of the three maps you're gonna adopt.

And then if you can't get those, then it goes to a rank order voting.

And I'm not gonna go through the explanation of that, but everybody picks it and there's a numerical number assigned to it, and you follow the instructions.

And that would be plan B.

- And that was developed as part of the change to the constitution, so that's all warranted in the constitution.

- I would say there's a plan C if that doesn't work, where it then goes to random selection by the secretary of state.

- And then somewhere, the Michigan Supreme Court could get involved in this?

(chuckles) - Yes.

- Yeah.

- You don't wanna get there, do you?

- No.

(laughs) - Do you feel confident you have the right maps at this point?

- Yeah, I do.

I think we've worked hard on 'em.

We've probably spent since the middle of August on them, on the collaborative maps.

And like I said before, a lot of discussion on how we configured them.

And, you know, some commissioners agree with certain things and not certain things.

And there's areas where we all would say, "Yeah, hey, that's a good idea.

Let's do it that way."

So I think we've got some good products out there.

It's just a matter of selecting the right one that fits the state.

- It sounds like you all get along really well, and maybe that's because you're dreaming about maps at this point.

You're all so involved in it.

And you're sharing these stories of seeing maps as you're in the grocery store.

But what has it been like to be together and to...

I mean, these are the inaugural maps.

This is something so new and different.

Not the only state doing it, but to be a part of it and to get to know each other.

- Well, that's interesting question because when we started the commission, we could only meet on Zoom.

So we did that from September of last year until we started the public hearings, which was in May, the beginning of May of this year.

And during that time, we met once in Lansing when the restriction was removed temporarily for a few days, actually, and then we went back to Zoom meetings.

But once we started meeting together, I felt that those meetings were really significant in us getting together as a group and working together as a group.

We got to meet people and developed relationships with the people and made a huge difference.

It makes a huge difference being there personally.

- Yeah, I think we're a team, and we all recognize that we're a team, and we are in this together.

And I feel like that feeling of teamwork and togetherness is what's sort of leading us through this process.

And I think we all have warm feelings towards each other.

And I feel like that environment is what's going to allow us to be successful and to actually reach agreement on these maps.

And I believe that we will reach an agreement when it comes time for us to vote.

And I think we're going to not have any problems going with planning.

- Well, let me say that we didn't sing kumbaya every time we met, but our relationships were to the point where when we did hit a rough patch, we were able to work through it and come out stronger on the other side with our relationships with all the commissioners.

- We have the utmost respect for all the commissioners.

- Very good.

We're all looking forward to seeing these maps.

Thank you for your civic duty.

I think we all appreciate it.

Rebecca Szetela, thank you so much for leading the charge.

Doug Clark, thank you.

And, Steven Lett, thank you for joining us today on "West Michigan Week".

- Thanks for having us.

- Thanks for having us.

- Thank you very much.

- And thank you for joining us.

We'll see you again soon.

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