Alaska Supreme Court rules Cantwell's separation from Denali Borough House district unconstitutional

The Alaska Supreme Court has ruled on multiple lawsuits pertaining to the state’s new House and Senate District maps.

The ruling, issued Friday, upholds most of what a Superior Court decided earlier this year.  One notable exception is that the Alaska Supreme Court says Cantwell should be moved back into the district that contains the rest of the Denali Borough and the Northern Susitna Valley.

As drawn, the map for District 30 includes communities in the Mat-Su north and west of Wasilla as well as the entirety of the Denali Borough apart from Cantwell.  Instead, Cantwell was placed in a large rural district that stretches from the Canadian border to Holy Cross.  The Alaska Supreme Court ruled that excluding Cantwell from the rest of the Denali Borough violated a constitutional requirement for compactness in House districts.

One of the claims of the Mat-Su’s lawsuit is that Valley districts are, in general, overpopulated.  The borough says this results in dilution of the votes of its residents.  Adding Cantwell into District 30 would put the district about two percent over the ideal population figure, but the Alaska Supreme Court ruling states that the population overage would not be excessive.

Another section of the district map that will need to be reconfigured is Senate District K in Anchorage.  In this case, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that the pairing of East Anchorage and Eagle River House Districts into a senate district constitutes QUOTE “constituted an unconstitutional political gerrymander violating equal protection under the Alaska Constitution….”  This affirms the earlier ruling of Judge Thomas Matthews in February, and the Alaska Redistricting Board will be required to make different pairings to form the senate districts.

The entire process, from the initial lawsuits to the Alaska Supreme Court appeal, was on an accelerated timeline.  The court had until April 1^st to rule on the matter due to the June 1^st deadline for candidates to file for state office.