Georgia will have two General Assembly sessions this year— the first, currently ongoing, is scheduled to end in late March and the second is to be held sometime later this year. And now comes word from the U.S. Census Bureau indicating that the second session, which must redraw state and federal political districts to accommodate population shifts, will now be pushed far into the summer.
A terse announcement last week from a Census Bureau official says that the data needed in order to draw maps to reconfigure some of Georgia’s congressional and legislative posts won’t be arriving at least until July 30th.
Political boundaries must be adjusted every decade based on census data. For example, around 570,000 people should reside in a congressional district. Georgia has 12 of them. And those districts are drawn in Georgia by the political party that controls the legislature (Republicans) to have an approximately equal number of people within the boundaries of each.
There are now congressional and state legislative districts, of course, that have grown faster than Georgia as a whole and have more people than ideal. And some districts have lost population. All this means that GOP-controlled state House and Senate reapportionment committees are now thinking about the map-drawing work ahead of them.
There are also population shifts in city council, county commission and school board districts that must be addressed at the local level.
By the way, according to preliminary estimates, Georgia is neither gaining nor losing seats in Congress. But expect GOP map drawers to reconfigure lines relating to the suburban Atlanta 6th and 7th U.S. Congressional districts that are currently represented by Democrats. The GOP map drawers will seek to shift around Republican voter neighborhoods into one of those districts in order to hopefully win a seat in 2022.
