LOCAL GOVERNMENT REDISTRICTING:
INDIANA’S NEGLECTED MANDATE
Hundreds of local governments are required by
Indiana state law and the Equal Protection Clause of
the U.S. Constitution to redistrict every ten years.
Many fail to do so.
A Report Prepared by
IndianaLocalRedistricting.com
Kristina Byers
Sarah Anderson Hannon
Lisa Hochstetler
Kelsey Kauffman
Brett O’Bannon
Aden Richards
Bruce Stinebrickner
Richard Walsh
JANUARY 2024
Why do local governments need another extension? 3
Why is an interim study committee needed? 4
Why do local governments have to redistrict? 5
Why does local redistricting matter? 7
Which Indiana local governments are required to redistrict? 8
What are the key legal requirements for lawful redistricting? 10
County Council Redistricting 11
Some Reflections on the Redistricting Process 20
After extensive research, we have identified–for the first time–most of the Indiana local governments that are required to redistrict after a decennial U.S. census and have identified which of those local governments redistricted after the 2020 census.
Of Indiana’s counties, school corporations, cities, and towns that were legally obliged to redistrict by the end of 2022, we found 23 counties, 12 school corporations, and as many as 90 cities and towns that did not redistrict. A few local government officials knew they were required to redistrict and refused to do it. Most, however, either did not know they were required to redistrict or feared it would be too complicated and expensive.
In 2022, the Indiana General Assembly passed HB1285. It gave an extension to the end of that calendar year to counties and school corporations that failed to redistrict in 2021 and then prohibited redistricting by any local government after 2022 unless a lawsuit were filed (or after rare specified events). Few, if any, counties or school corporations were able to take advantage of the extension because they had elections that year.
As two Indiana cities that failed to redistrict in 2022 learned in 2023, redistricting via lawsuit is cumbersome, time-consuming, and very expensive. To avoid further lawsuits and ensure that all local governments in Indiana that were required to redistrict complete the process by 2025, we are asking the 2024 Indiana General Assembly to
1) Give all local governments a one-year extension to complete the redistricting process
2. Appoint an interim study committee to consider and address existing barriers to successful local redistricting
First, redistricting for local governments has been unusually difficult this decade due to the very late arrival of census data in 2021.
Second, 2022 was an election year for county councils and many school boards. Because redistricting cannot take place during an election, an extension until the end of 2022 did not leave them enough time to redistrict.
Third, there was no extension for cities and towns even though many local officials did not know until now that they had to redistrict, especially towns with “residential districts.”
An extension until 2025 is much more likely to succeed than the 2022 extension. County councils have elections in 2024 but they are only for at-large seats, and fewer than 10 school boards that use electoral districts (the only ones that have to redistrict) have elections in 2024 for single-member seats. Moveover, many (perhaps most) towns and cities with populations below 10,000 that were required to redistrict in 2022 did not know that they had to do so, especially due to confusion over whether those with “residential” districts are required to redistrict (see p. 9).
Through our discussions with hundreds of dedicated local officials over the past twelve years, we have identified numerous barriers to successful local redistricting that the General Assembly can and should address, including
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Underlying a system of representative democracy are two related concepts: “electoral equality”—that each person’s vote should count approximately the same as every other person’s vote–and “representational equality”—that each elected representative should represent approximately the same number of people.
Thus, “one-person/one-vote” means much more than banning individual voters from voting more than once in the same election. It also means that the number of people represented by each member of an elective government needs to be approximately equal. If one person on an elected body represents 1,000 people while another represents only 500, then each person in the more populous district is underrepresented. Each individual’s vote in the less populous district is worth twice what each individual’s vote in the more populous district is.
All elected government bodies in the United States that use districts to choose their members are required to have nearly equally sized districts. (The U.S. Senate is an exception to this requirement.) Congressional districts must have exactly equal populations (plus or minus one person). State legislative districts can have a 1% - 2% “population deviation.”
Since local governments can be trickier to redistrict, they are given wider latitude by the courts. Their smaller populations mean that meandering boundaries, annexations, and intersecting features like rivers, railways and interstates make creating compact, contiguous districts with nearly equal populations a challenge. In turn, courts have generally imposed a 10% cap on “population deviation” for local governments. (In Indiana, school boards are allowed a 15% deviation.)
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Although local governments rarely receive the attention that state legislatures and the US Congress receive, they have an enormous impact on the lives of those living within their jurisdictions. They decide which local roads are paved and repaired, whether and how garbage is collected, who will be hired as school superintendents, principals, teachers, and coaches. They run police departments and jails; provide water and sewage treatment; and often provide and maintain parks, reservoirs, and sports facilities. In doing so, Indiana local governments spend billions of dollars of taxpayer money annually.*
Local redistricting has taken on added importance in Indiana because decades of failing to redistrict means that many local government election systems are now very out of balance, with some voters having far greater say over who governs them than other voters who may live just across the road.
Consider the North Putnam School Corporation, for example. North Putnam encompasses the six northernmost townships in Putnam County with a total population of about 10,000 people. The school corporation has a seven-person board that controls an annual budget of almost $20,000,000. When we began our inquiry into local districting in 2011, one of the seven board members was elected at-large while the other six members each represented--and were elected solely by--residents of their own township. The smallest of these townships, Russell, had only 823 residents, while the largest, Floyd, had 4,011 residents. Thus, each Russell Township resident had five-times as much say over school board decisions as each Floyd Township resident. In 2013, a Floyd Township resident, using our data, successfully sued the North Putnam school board over its failure to redistrict.
*Indiana county governments and Indiana cities/towns spend a combined total of about $30 billion a year. County governments spend about $2,290 per person. Cities and towns spend an average of $2,168 per person. [See https://www.in.gov/dlgf/files/2021-Report-on-Expenditures-Per-Capita.pdf, pp. 7 and 35.]
Indiana state law requires all county councils, all first- and second-class city councils, most third-class city councils, many town councils, and some school boards to redistrict every 10 years. That sounds simple enough regarding county councils and larger cities. But why do only “some” of the state’s hundreds of school boards have to redistrict? And which ones are they? Likewise, why do “many” but not all of Indiana’s hundreds of towns have to redistrict and which ones are they?
Until we did the research over the past four years, no one in the state knew the answers to these key questions. Not the Indiana Elections Division. Not the state Education Department nor the Indiana School Boards Association. Not the Indiana Association of Cities and Towns. And, in most cases, not the school board or town officials themselves. Without anyone knowing which school boards and which towns were required to redistrict—including most of the members of those school boards and town councils themselves—it is not surprising that so few of them did so.
Electoral vs Residential Districts
To understand which local governments in Indiana are required to redistrict, one first needs to understand the difference between “electoral” and “residential districts.” This distinction can be confusing.
With both residential and electoral districts, the county, city, or school corporation is divided into non-overlapping districts (often called “wards” in Indiana). Each of these districts is represented on the governing board or council by a single elected member who lives in the district they represent.
The difference between “electoral” and “representative” districts lies in who can vote for the district representatives. In residential districts, candidates have to live in distinct districts but all voters in the county/city/school corporation can vote on all candidates. In electoral districts, only voters who live in the same district as the candidate can vote for that candidate.
Electoral and residential districts are not the only ways to choose a local governing body. (That would be too easy!)
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To make matters more confusing, county commissioners and school boards that have residential districts do not have to redistrict, yet cities and towns that have residential districts do. The underlying rationale for schools may be that school boards with residential districts are often amalgamations of two or more school corporations and having residential districts ensures that all of the parties to the amalgamation have one or more seats on the amalgamated board. Meanwhile, when Boards of Commissioners were established in the 19th century, they were tasked primarily with constructing and maintaining roads and bridges, a task of equal concern to rural and urban portions of the county. Thus, counties were divided into thirds geographically without regard to population. Neither of those rationales generally apply to cities and towns (a city or town COULD be a combination of two previously existing towns or cities, but seldom, if ever, is); hence the requirement to redistrict cities and towns with residential districts. Without a mandate to redistrict commissioners and school boards, population deviations are often extreme. For example, both the Johnson County commissioner districts and the Delphi School Board districts have population deviations of close to 200%!
Districts must
There are many other criteria to consider in good redistricting–like keeping communities of interest together–but the core four above are the ones we have used to assess whether a council or board did or did not meet the bare minimum requirements.
Summary: Indiana’s 92 counties did a far better job of redistricting this decade than they did the decade before. In 2011, only 19 counties redistricted more-or-less correctly. In 2021, 54 redistricted in accord with the key legal requirements. An additional 14 came close (usually with population deviations over 10% but below 15%). However, 24 failed to redistrict or clearly violated key legal requirements.
County Commissioners and County Councils
In most Indiana counties, a three-person Board of Commissioners serves as the executive and legislative bodies for the county while the County Council serves as the fiscal body. The Board of Commissioners has residential districts and is not required to redistrict. In all but the three largest counties, the county councils have three at-large positions plus four members elected from “electoral districts.” Thus, the council has to be redistricted and it is the commissioners who are responsible for doing it.
Counties that failed to redistrict
Readers are invited to look at our website for detailed reports on the 73 counties that failed to redistrict in 2011, including district maps, population data, and population deviations. We hope to post something similar for the counties that failed to redistrict in 2021 or (in one case) violated key requirements.
In the meantime, below is our list of counties that failed to redistrict in 2021 and our estimate of the population deviation for their councils (to see the 14 counties that came close to redistricting correctly, with deviations below 15%, see our website).
County | Population Deviation as of 1/1/2022 |
Washington | 6% but districts are non-contiguous |
Blackford | 16% |
Jefferson | 16% |
Martin | 16% |
White | 16% |
Parke | 17% |
Benton | 18% |
Fulton | 18% |
Brown | 19% |
Jackson | 19% |
Johnson | 20% |
Clark | 21% |
Decatur | 24% |
Greene | 24% |
Switzerland | 24% |
Adams | 25% |
Bartholomew | 25% |
Ripley | 25% |
Warren | 26% |
Ohio | 32% |
Sullivan | 33% |
Owen | 38% |
Newton | 40% |
Union | 47% |
Table A: Counties that failed to redistrict in 2021
(or did so improperly) and their population deviations
Why counties failed to redistrict
The counties that failed to redistrict or did it improperly are not monolithic.
Most important, all seven of the counties that have populations below 10,000 are on the list, nearly one-third of the total. These "micro-counties" struggled for two main reasons: They lacked resources available to many other counties (especially GIS expertise) and redistricting is much harder when you have fewer precincts to play with. Although we worked with all seven of these counties in 2021 to create acceptable maps, in each case they would have had to reprecinct in order to get below the maximum allowed population deviation (10%) without slicing and dicing all their precincts. Reprecincting presents its own barriers, but that was especially true in 2021. The Indiana Elections Division required that counties apply to reprecinct before the census data were released in September. The IED had also decreed that all new precincts had to have a minimum of 600 people, which effectively prevented the seven smallest counties from redistricting properly, even if they had had the time to do it. We need to recognize the greater challenges that the smallest counties face.
A second distinction among the 22 failed redistricters is whether they were openly defiant about not redistricting or tried and gave up. Newton County commissioners, for example, were open to doing it. We provided them with a map that would work with minimal reprecincting; they discussed the matter, but eventually decided they didn't have time to reprecinct and would redistrict in 2026. Contrast that with Decatur and Parke Counties, whose commissioners openly stated their defiance of the requirement to redistrict, or Bartholomew County, whose council districts over the past few decades have violated every rule.
SUMMARY: Out of the 254 public school boards in 88 counties (not counting the four largest counties) that we examined, we found only 31 that used “electoral districts” and therefore were required to redistrict. Of these 31 school boards,
Types of School Boards
School boards in Indiana can be:
Indiana law states that only school boards with electoral districts need to redistrict.
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Which school boards were required to redistrict in 2021?
Since no one in the state knew which boards had which electoral systems and therefore which had to redistrict, we spent four months in 2021 calling school boards throughout Indiana (excluding the four largest counties—Allen, Lake, Marion, and St. Joseph), and then double-checking their answers with county clerks, county election boards, board attorneys, and voting data. We found the following breakdown for the 254 school boards outside the four largest counties:
o 195 (76%) school boards used residential districts
o 31 (12%) school boards had electoral districts
o 14 (6%) school boards had no districts and elected all candidates at-large
o 10 (4%) school boards were appointed
o 4 (2%) were undetermined
(A complete list of all Indiana school districts, their counties, and their method of choosing school board members can be found on our website, IndianaLocalRedistricting.com.)
Thus, of the 254 public school boards in 88 of Indiana’s counties we found only 31 that used electoral districts and thus were required to redistrict.
Did the 31 school boards that were required to redistrict do it?
School Corporation | County | Population Deviation |
Borden/Henryville | Clark | unknown |
Delphi Comm | Carroll | 186% |
East Gibson | Gibson | 64% (est.) |
Fayette County | Fayette | 27% |
Flat Rock-Hawcreek | Bartholomew | 82% |
Franklin County | Franklin | unknown |
Loogootee Comm | Martin | 101% |
Mooresville Consolidated | Morgan | 137% |
Northwestern | Howard | unknown |
Shelby Eastern Schools | Shelby | 68% |
Twin Lakes School Corp | White and Carroll | ~30% |
White River Valley | Greene | 75% |
Table B: Indiana school boards that have electoral districts, yet failed to
redistrict by December 31, 2021
Please note: Unlike counties and school corporations, our research on municipalities is still at an intermediate stage, especially for towns and cities with populations below 10,000. Spreadsheets on the following groups of cities and towns can be found on our website:
For the last group (cities/towns with populations between 1,000 and 10,000), we have focused thus far only on identifying which ones were required to redistrict and not on whether or how well they completed the task.
We would be very grateful for additions and corrections. You can contact us at kkauffman@depauw.edu .
Summary
Most Indiana cities and towns with populations greater than 10,000 redistricted in 2022 and did so more-or-less correctly. Of the several hundred towns and cities with populations between 1,000 and 10,000, about 40% were not required to redistrict for the simple reason that they have no districts (all candidates run at-large and can live anywhere in the town/city). The other approximately 60% have either electoral or residential districts and thus are required to redistrict, though many of them did not know that. Not surprisingly, a majority of cities and towns with populations below 10,000 that were supposed to redistrict appear not to have redistricted.
Types of cities and towns
Indiana separates its municipalities into “cities” and “towns.” Cities generally have larger populations than towns, but much overlap exists. The “town” of Merrillville, for example, has a population of 36,444 while the “city” of Cannelton has a population of 1,473. Different regulations apply to each, but redistricting requirements are similar. The state also (regrettably) categorizes all cities as first-class, second-class, or third-class cities based on size.
First-class cities
Indianapolis is the only “first-class” city in Indiana. Redistricting there is a high-profile, heavily scrutinized event that did not require our attention.
Second-Class Cities
All second-class cities (usually, but not always, those with populations greater than 35,000 but less than 600,000) must use electoral districts and thus are required to redistrict or recertify following each decennial census. Of the 23 cities in this class for which we have complete data, four cities (Hammond, Muncie, Richmond and South Bend) recertified their districts, while 17 cities redistricted.
Only two second-class cities failed to redistrict before the December 31, 2022 deadline: Anderson and Gary. Citizens in both cities sued their respective councils in federal court using our data. In February 2023, the court ordered adoption of a map we drew for Gary. Litigation with Anderson is ongoing.
Our estimated average population deviation of the 21 second-class cities that redistricted or recertified is 8%, with 14 cities at or below the average.
Third-Class Cities with Populations Greater than 10,000
All third-class cities with a population greater than 10,000 have electoral districts and are required to redistrict. Of the 36 municipalities in this class for which we have the data, we know of only four that we think have not recertified or redistricted. (One third-class city, East Chicago, was sued in state court in January 2023 by its own mayor over a technicality regarding adoption of new districts. In February 2023, the judge reinstated the East Chicago City Council’s map.) The four cities that declined to redistrict are:
Beech Grove’s and Peru’s population deviations are well outside the average for other large third-class cities, which is 8%. Nine of the large third-class cities have population deviations of 5% or below.
Towns with Populations Greater than 10,000
There are 19 towns in Indiana with a population greater than 10,000. Of the 18 towns in this category for which we have the data, only four have electoral districts; the remaining 14 employ residential districts. All 18 completed the recertification / redistricting process by December 2022.
The population deviation among the ten towns for which we can calculate it ranges from 0.4% to 10%, with an estimated average deviation of 5%. Seventy percent of those have population deviations that are at or below the average.
Towns and Cities with populations less than 10,000 but greater than 1,000
As noted at the beginning of this section, we have only completed the first phase of our research on towns/cities with populations below 10,000, which was to find out which electoral system each of these 218 cities and towns used and, therefore, which ones were required to redistrict. Here is what we found:
A strong association exists between the size of towns and cities and their election system preferences, as well as whether they managed to satisfy the mandate to recertify/redistrict. The average population for cities and towns with populations between 1,000 and 10,000 was a bit above 3,000. While electoral districts are the most common choice (51%) for towns and cities above that average, they are the least common choice (8%) for those municipalities below the average. Conversely, while the wholly at-large system (i.e., those with no districts) constitutes the least common (9%) system for municipalities above the average population, below the average a clear majority (56%) of towns and cities have no districts. That is, the smaller the town/city is, the more likely it will eschew districts and instead employ a wholly at-large system.
Consistent with this pattern, we sampled 20 towns with populations below 1,000 and all of them had town councils with no districts.
Population size also seems to help determine the probability that a town or city in this class will satisfy the redistricting/recertifying mandate. While municipalities with populations above the average failed to recertify or redistrict at a rate of 62%, those below the average failed to satisfy the mandate at a rate of 74%. Likely explanations for this include greater resource and information deficits among the smallest towns and cities. That is, the smallest towns and cities are less likely to know they have an obligation to redistrict or recertify, and less likely to have the technical and financial resources to take on what often appears to be a daunting task.
With second-class cities and third-class cities and towns with populations greater than 10,000, we asked and charted two additional questions: What was the final council or board vote on redistricting? Did they engage an outside consultant or create a citizens’ commission to assist with redistricting? Below we reflect on the resulting data.
How contentious is redistricting in Indiana cities and towns?
We think it is well worth noting that in contrast to how deeply polarizing redistricting can be at the national and state levels, we find that local redistricting quite often is accomplished by consensus.
In our cohort of large third-class cities, votes on redistricting or recertification were unanimous 100% of the time. Similarly, of 16 towns with populations greater than 10,000 where we know the vote, in all but two towns redistricting plans were adopted unanimously. In fact, for all third class cities and towns with populations over 10,000, a total of only three dissenting votes were cast.
In second-class cities, there was more conflict. Still, voting on redistricting tended toward consensus. Among the 21 cities where we know the vote, plans passed unanimously two-thirds of the time. Only once was a plan rejected in a split vote, that city being Anderson.
What is the value added of outside consultants?
Cities and towns in our survey quite often relied on their own resources to affect a recertification or to redistrict. Yet many councils have employed or relied on outside assistance. These external agents include independent commissions, consultants, and Indiana Local Government Redistricting (that’s us). The distributions are as follows:
While the cost of employing an outside consultant can run into the many tens of thousands of dollars, there appears to be little variation in outcome across agents with respect to population deviation. The distribution of population deviations is as follows:
Though external assistance can greatly ease the burden of redistricting on town and city councils, analysis of our data suggests that there is little payoff in the relatively large sums charged by most outside consultants. Cities and towns can achieve similar results by relying on their own technical resources, setting up citizens’ commissions or finding non-profit organizations or college GIS centers willing to help.*
*Someday we would like to see a local government body challenge students in their local high school government classes to draw maps for them. Creating compact, contiguous districts with nearly equal populations is a lot like playing Tetris–something that young people are much better at than the average board or council member. Offer a $500 prize for the winning entry. It would be a lot cheaper than hiring an outside consultant who has never set foot inside your county, school corporation or town before and charges $500 an hour.
(forthcoming)
2011 - 2020
A surprising discovery
In fall 2011, students at DePauw University taking an honors scholar course with Dr. Kelsey Kauffman stumbled upon the curious fact that most Indiana counties, cities, and towns as well as many school corporations were not planning to redistrict after the 2010 census even though they were required to do so. Districts that were once carefully balanced by population were now badly distorted with some districts having much larger populations than other districts. As a result, some voters had much less influence over their local governments than others.
An initial focus on local changes
DePauw University is in Putnam County, Indiana. Not surprisingly, the first local governments that attracted the students’ attention were the Putnam County Council and two local school corporations, North and South Putnam. They found that
The students began by addressing the Putnam County Council and the County Commissioners (who are responsible for redistricting the council) and both promptly agreed to redistrict the Council. They also addressed the South Putnam school board, which decided to avoid redistricting by switching to “residential” districts. The North Putnam school board, however, dug in its heels and refused to redistrict even though one of its six board districts had only 823 residents and another had more than 4,000. Residents of the smaller district had five times the voting power as the residents in the larger district, one of whom sued and won using data and analysis provided by the students.
The problem statewide
Despite their successes nearby, the students ran into an unexpected barrier in convincing local governments that they had to redistrict. The Indiana Elections Division (part of the Indiana Secretary of State’s office) was advising local officials that they did not have to redistrict if they did not want to, regardless of what state statutes required! Not surprisingly, most county officials listened to the Elections Division instead of the students.
Undaunted, DePauw students next took their campaign to the state legislature. Armed with maps, population data, state statutes, and court rulings, they took on the Elections Division, testifying about the widespread failure of Indiana counties to redistrict. To underscore the point, they assisted in a successful lawsuit against the Vigo County commissioners who had refused to redistrict in 2011.
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The first website: documenting county redistricting
For nearly a year, DePauw freshman Richard Walsh and Dr. Kauffman worked with the outstanding DePauw GIS center to create maps for 88 of Indiana’s 92 counties. (We skipped the three most populous counties where redistricting was already a high-profile decennial event and one additional county where we lacked data.) We then created the IndianaLocalRedistricting.com website with data, maps, and analysis for those 88 counties. Our analysis showed that only 15 counties had redistricted properly or had existing districts that were already in compliance. The students released their website at an event at the Statehouse during the 2013 Indiana General Assembly. Over the next few years, approximately 25 counties voluntarily redistricted, most in response to our original website.
You can find all the original content on the success or failure of Indiana counties to redistrict their councils at IndianaLocalRedistricting.com.
2021 – 2024
Pandemic delays
Counties, of course, were scheduled to redistrict again in 2021, and so were an unknown number of school boards. What no one expected was the extent to which the pandemic would impact everyone’s efforts, including our own.
Normally decennial census data is available in the spring; Indiana is typically one of the first states to receive their data because its legislative session ends in April in odd-numbered years. Instead, the data arrived in September, leaving just four months for first the legislature, then counties, then school corporations to redistrict.
The schedule was so compressed that the Indiana Elections Division sent a memo in July to all county clerks telling them that counties needed to let the Division know if they required re-precincting before they ever saw their own data! The state legislature finished redistricting itself and Indiana’s congressional districts at the end of September.
Counties and School Boards
Then it was the counties’ turn. We had already set to work calculating population deviations for all county councils and emailing our data and offers of help (free of charge) to county officials. We were delighted when, unlike last decade, most counties began the process.
A much bigger and more daunting task was figuring out which of Indiana’s hundreds of school corporations had boards that were elected using “electoral districts,” the only ones that needed to redistrict. Sarah Anderson Hannon, an attorney who had been one of the original DePauw students involved in the redistricting project a decade earlier, found herself with a gap between jobs. She and Dr. Kauffman set to work calling every school board and school superintendent in the state to ask what sort of electoral districts they had. Before long, they realized that most did not have a clue, so they also searched voting data for each school board, and contacted board attorneys and county clerks to be sure they had it right. After three months of intensive work, they had, for the first time, produced a complete list of all school boards and their method of selecting board members.
To our surprise, only 31 school boards used electoral districts. We contacted all of them to let them know that they needed to redistrict and offer our help (again, free-of-charge). As noted in the section on school boards, a third decided to join the vast majority of other school boards and switch to residential districts. Another third redistricted (some with our help). A final third refused.
Cities and Towns
Municipalities were up next in 2022. Everyone knew that first-class, second-class and the bigger third-class cities needed to redistrict, or so we thought. We (primarily Dr. Kauffman and political scientist Brett O’Bannon) spent most of the fall months assisting second- and third-class cities and eventually some of the largest towns to redistrict. Aden Richards, a high school math and physics teacher who has volunteered as our principal map maker since 2011, ended up spending almost every weekend from late October to the end of December plus Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks just making maps for cities and towns we had urged to redistrict.
But what about all the other hundreds of smaller cities and towns? Once again, no one in the state knew which of them were required to redistrict and which were not. That task fell primarily to Lisa Hochstettler, Kristina Byers, and Christina Kovats, researchers with the Indiana League of Women Voters, and Tilly Robinson, an intern with Common Cause of Indiana. They spent months in 2023 contacting every city and town in the state with populations between 1,000 and 10,000 people to find out what type of election districts they had (electoral, residential, or no districts), the number and type of council seats, and, if possible, whether they had redistricted in 2022, something most officials they spoke with knew nothing about.
What’s ahead?
If the 2024 Indiana General Assembly approves an extension for all local governments that did not redistrict or recertify existing districts following the 2020 census to redistrict by June 2025, we plan to contact the 22 counties, 12 school boards, and 90 or so cities and towns that had missed the redistricting deadline to let them know of the extension, provide them with data, direct them to useful on-line redistricting and mapping tools, and offer assistance with how to proceed. In the past, we have also offered to draw maps free-of-charge. However, we will begin charging $500 - $1,000 for map-making, so that we can hire students and others to do that.
KRISTINA BYERS is currently a researcher with the League of Women Voters and the Indiana Local Redistricting Project. She has worked primarily on statutory requirements for redistricting and on cities and towns with populations below 10,000.
SARAH ANDERSON HANNON was a member of the original Indiana Local Redistricting Project as a student at DePauw University in 2011-12. In 2021, she spent many months contacting Indiana school boards. She is now an attorney in Washington, D.C.
LISA HOCHSTETLER is a researcher with the League of Women Voters and the Indiana Local Redistricting Project. Lisa has worked primarily on redistricting by cities and towns.
KELSEY KAUFFMAN has led the Indiana Local Government Redistricting project since its inception in 2011, first at DePauw and then independently.
BRETT O’BANNON is a political scientist who has worked on municipal redistricting for this project and helped write this report.
ADEN RICHARDS is a high school math and physics teacher who has been our principal map maker since the beginning of the project.
BRUCE STINEBRICKNER is a political scientist with a specialty in state and local government. He has advised this project since 2011.
RICHARD WALSH was a member of the original cohort of DePauw students working on the project in 2011. He played a key role in charting and mapping county redistricting in 2011-13. Richard created and has hosted the IndianaLocalRedistricting.com website on his company’s server ever since then.