The president of the League of Women Voters of Florida is warning state legislators not to embark on a mid-decade congressional redistricting plan, saying it's unprecedented and goes against the 2010 “Fair Districts” constitutional amendment.
“In 2010, 63 percent of Floridians said that they did not want our state’s districts drawn on a partisan basis,” League President Jessica Lowe-Minor said. “They did not want them to be drawn with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent.”
"And here we are 15 years later, in an unprecedented attempt to redistrict in the middle of a cycle without a new census to justify those numbers," Lowe-Minor said Sunday in an interview on WPLG Channel 10's "This Week in South Florida" with host Glenna Milberg.
Florida House Speaker Daniel Perez said earlier this month that he is setting up a select committee to look into redrawing congressional districts, as Republicans seek to keep control of Congress in 2026.
READ MORE: Florida House Speaker Daniel Perez calls for state lawmakers to explore congressional redistricting
The Miami Republican’s announcement came as Texas Republicans have moved forward with a controversial mid-decade redistricting plan and as President Donald Trump's White House has pressured other GOP-controlled states, including Florida, Missouri and South Carolina, to follow suit.
Changing congressional maps in a bid to ensure one party’s victory over another — called gerrymandering — has typically been done more furtively. But Trump's call for Texas to redraw the maps to better ensure that Republicans retain control of the House has blown the lid off the practice. Trump is trying to avoid losing control of Congress and, with it, prospects for his policy goals in the latter part of his term.
Meanwhile, leaders of Democratic-controlled states, such as California, Illinois and New York, have weighed possibly redrawing districts to help Democrats. Flipping a handful of seats either way could determine which party controls the U.S. House, which Republicans now hold by a slim margin.
Redistricting typically happens once a decade after the U.S. census. The last round of redistricting happened in 2022.
The 2010 amendment requires districts to be compact, contiguous, and aligned with geographic or political boundaries like city limits or county lines.
"There is no reason, from our perspective, to redo that map at this time — certainly not without new census numbers justifying the effort," Lowe-Minor told "This Week in South Florida."
Lowe-Minor said the mid-decade redistricting talk appears to be less about population shifts and more about political advantage.
“We’ve actually never in our country’s history had a mid-cycle census,” she said. "That would require a huge national effort to have an entirely new census created."
She added that the League and most Florida voters want to see the Legislature tackling issues more pressing to Floridians: “The rising health care costs, the rising cost of homeowners insurance, housing affordability, education, the fact that it costs so much money to go buy food at the grocery store — those are the things that our Legislature and our governor need to be focusing on, not trying to rig the system to benefit themselves.”
Lowe-Minor said the League of Women Voters of Florida would oppose any move to redistricting before results of the 2030 Census count.
“We think it’s very clear that this is a power grab, that this is something our state constitution expressly prohibits,” she said. “We cannot in Florida have districts that are drawn with the explicit intent to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent."
The News Service of Florida contributed to this report.
