A five-member panel voted behind closed doors Tuesday to advance a “congressional map concept” that will be used as a guide for legislation that will attempt to redraw the state’s eight congressional districts.

The Governor’s Redistricting Advisory Commission voted 3-2 to recommend the map to Gov. Wes Moore (D) and the Maryland General Assembly. U.S. Senate Angela Alsobrooks (D), who chaired the panel, said the vote followed a “transparent redistricting process.”

“From the start, our commitment has been simple: Put Marylanders in the driver’s seat,” Alsobrooks said in a statement following a roughly one-hour meeting that the public could not observe.

“This process has been conducted in the open, with opportunities for the public to participate, weigh in, and submit their own map proposals for consideration,” her statement said. “All Marylanders — regardless of party, background, or ZIP code — can engage with this process, see the options, and make their voice heard.”

The concept map overhauls the 1st District — the state’s lone Republican district, held by GOP Rep. Andy Harris. While the district currently includes the Eastern Shore, Cecil, and part of eastern Baltimore County, the conceptual map would have it stretching from the Eastern Shore over the Bay Bridge through Anne Arundel County and into part of Columbia in Howard County. The shift moves more liberal Democrats into the district held by Harris, the chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus.

Changes to districts held by Democrats do not appear to threaten control of those seats.

The vote was blasted by state Republicans, with House Minority Leader Jason Buckel (R-Allegany) saying it “confirmed what we have been saying all along: that this Commission had nothing to do with fairness, nothing to do with the wants and needs of our citizens, and, quite frankly, nothing to do with Maryland.”

“Instead, this Commission has everything to do with D.C. partisan politics and the desires of the Democratic National Committee,” Buckel said. “This Commission was merely a drawn-out political sham with a predetermined outcome: To rid Maryland of any Republican representation in Congress and disenfranchise voters in Western Maryland and the Eastern Shore. Nothing drives this home more than their absurd end product.”

National Democratic leaders, who have been pressing Maryland to respond to redistricting schemes in GOP states, hailed the vote.

“Partisan Republican hacks were counting on Democrats to roll over while they gerrymander congressional maps in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina and Florida,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said in a statement. “They were wrong. Arrogant and corrupt Republicans started this battle. Democrats will end it. We will ensure that there is a free and fair midterm election in November.”

But redistricting still faces a difficult future in Maryland, where Senate President Bill Ferguson (D-Baltimore City), a member of the commission, is opposed to midcycle redistricting. A redistricting bill, should it reach the Senate, is not expected to receive a vote from the full chamber.

Ferguson and fellow commission member, Cumberland Mayor Ray Morriss, a Republican, voted against the proposed map Tuesday.

Ferguson said in a statement that the map “fails the Governor’s own test. It breaks apart more neighborhoods and communities than our existing map, and it fails the constitutional requirement of one person, one vote. We heard from no Boards of Elections. We heard nothing from the Office of the Attorney General of Maryland, which would have to defend this process and outcome. We heard no testimony to the impact on our election cycle. Ultimately, a flawed process has delivered a flawed product.”

Morris, who said he was asked to serve on the commission to ensure fair congressional districts, said that, “After a while, it became obvious that definition of fair that was being put out there was what was fair for the Democratic Party.”

The governor’s office said it will send the proposed map to the House speaker’s office, and from there “it will be in the hands of the Maryland General Assembly,” Moore said recently, noting that it “is not an administration bill.”

Moore has defended the commission he empaneled as transparent. But there was little public notice for Tuesday’s closed-door meeting, the second time the panel met and made decisions in private.

Four of the five members reached by Maryland Matters said they believed the meeting should have been held in public, and that the public would have benefited from witnessing the deliberations. But former Attorney General Brian Frosh, a commission member, said that while the closed-door meeting bothered him “it’s the governor’s commission, and he can run in any way he wants…. If he says, you’re going to do this in private. I think we end up doing it in private.”

The work of the panel at times seemed slapped together. There was initial confusion about how districts needed to be drawn or if changes would affect local election boards. Alsobrooks, in the panel’s first meeting, promised in-person meetings, but those never materialized.

“I’ve had concerns about the way this process has moved forward from the get-go,” Ferguson told reporters during a meeting before the commission met.

The legislation will start in the House.

House Majority Leader Del. David Moon (D-Montgomery) said a bill could be introduced quickly — possibly as early as the end of next week.

“If you’re the Speaker’s office, you can get it done pretty quickly, but there’s still logistical process, right?” Moon said, adding that there are some “logistical” hurdles that will need to be overcome.

“It’s going to be a multiday process, but I do think we are talking a matter of days, not weeks,” Moon said. “And again, if there’s a will to act, I do believe you’ll see the House wanting to act as soon as possible. I would hope this could be a conversation handled in the first month of session.”

The map approved by the commission will not likely be the one that goes to lawmakers, said Del. C.T. Wilson (D-Charles), a member of the commission who expects to lead the bill on the floor and may also be its sponsor.

“That map will not be the map submitted with the bill,” Wilson said. “It will be zeroed out. That was a concept of the map … because time is an issue. When citizens put maps in, they’re not going to be exact. If they were, well, that’d be a whole other question, wouldn’t it?”

The concept map increases the number of majority-minority districts from two to three. Two have populations that are at least 50% Black voters. But the map also included population deviations some members said would not meet strict “one person, one vote” population standards used by the courts.

Ferguson’s statement called the map “objectively unconstitutional.” He said the new map will likely result in the current map facing a court challenge. Democrats, he warned, risk losing seats the party currently holds.

Former Attorney General Brian Frosh, a member of the commission, said Ferguson’s characterization was inaccurate.

“We voted on a map in concept,” Frosh said, “The map needs to be tweaked. I don’t think it requires major changes. But it’s not perfectly aligned in terms of the numbers. You have to be within a few votes one way or another, a few people one way or another. It probably is out of line in a way that can be fixed.”

Frosh said the tweak should take “half an hour or 45 minutes by the folks at the Department of Legislative Services.”

The adjustments may not matter. Ferguson is a staunch opponent of mid-cycle redistricting, and any bill passed by the House is likely to be sent to the Senate Rules Committee to die without a committee hearing or full Senate vote.

The commission recommended the concept map following a series of 10 meetings — two of which were closed to the public.

More than three dozen maps were submitted by the public. The maps ranged from the basic, with no supporting documentation, to sophisticated iterations that included party registration and demographic data. But in two meetings one map, which was later tweaked, clearly garnered most of the attention.

“To me, when 28 out of 30 people all talk about the same map, it seems just, I don’t know, it just seemed a little odd to me,” Morriss said. “Everybody seemed to know which map they were going to talk about.”

When asked if he felt an outcome had been predetermined, Morriss said it “definitely gave the perception, to me, that something could be a little odd about it. Statistically, it just didn’t add up. So, yes.”

Morriss questioned the vote by the panel, noting that most of the public testimony did not support mid-cycle redistricting.

“I look back at the beginning, when over 70% of the people didn’t want to move forward,” Morriss said. “I think that said a lot. I think what the public got from this was what the Democratic party wanted for the state of Maryland, and for their national agenda. I don’t think the public really got a real — let’s use the word fair — a real, fair analysis of the congressional districts in the state.”

Wilson rejected that argument, saying testimony of roughly 30 people in each meeting was not the only consideration for the commission.

“This was a hearing,” Wilson said. “Not a poll.”

Moore appointed the panel in November, saying he he wanted to ensure the maps drawn in 2022 were “fair.” He has never provided a definition of the term.

But his efforts came as Republican states began hyper-partisan mid-cycle redistricting. The effort, kicked off in Texas, was seen as a way to improve chances of keeping a GOP majority in Congress in this fall’s elections.

In an interview a week ago, Moore said Maryland was reacting to Republican states who recast their maps to eliminate Democrats in Congress.

“The point is this is that if the rest of the country is going to go through a process of determining whether or not they have fair mass in a mid-decade process, then so will the state of Maryland,” Moore said during The Daily Record’s Eye on Annapolis opening day event.

In Maryland, the Democratic Party holds a 2-1 registration advantage over Republican voters, with Democrats accounting for about 50% of registered voters and the GOP and unaffiliated voters accounting for about 25% each.

Even so, Democrats hold seven of eight congressional seats in Maryland; 25 years ago, Republicans held four of the eight seats.

“It was not necessarily, in my mind, what was fair to all of the voters of the state of Maryland,” Morriss said of the commission’s work. “Especially in this case, the Republicans and the unaffiliated voters.”

Frosh said the commission and its recommendation was a response to Trump and MAGA Republicans policies on immigration, voting rights and the push for Republican states to redraw their own districts.

“I think that we can’t be holier than thou in this situation. If the Supreme Court says all you need to do is have an equal number of votes and not openly discriminate, then that’s what we should do,” Frosh said. “Why should we? Why should we cede that advantage to the Republican states? And I just think we’ve got to fight back, and as the old saying goes, you don’t bring a knife to a gunfight.”

Wilson agreed and said complaints about fairness from Maryland Republicans are not persuasive when racial equity is under attack by the Republicans at the federal level.

“The one thing I will clearly say is that my children are a protected class, and we can’t pretend that African Americans are the same thing as being Republican,” Wilson said. “And I don’t hear them saying that … about Texas, about Florida, about Missouri. I don’t see them fighting for a protected class of people in a country with a history of racism and violence.

“And to be clear, they still have a voice. They can still vote,” said Wilson. “My people couldn’t vote for the longest time. They can still vote.”

By Bryan P. Sears
Maryland Matters reporter Dianne J. Brown contributed to this report