The Lane County elections clerk is calling the August 6 vote by the Board of County Commissioners to send a redistricting proposal from a private law firm to voters a threat to election integrity.
Conservative Commissioners Ryan Ceniga, David Loveall and Pat Farr voted in favor while Progressive Commissioners Heather Buch and Laurie Trieger voted against the proposal that was submitted May 21 by Eugene law firm Harrang Long.
The proposal calls for a 2025 mid-cycle redistricting that is outside the normal 10-year cycle. Redistricting typically only happens to coincide when new census data is collected — once every decade.
“Introducing tasks outside the normal scope of election management within the proposed timeline poses significant risks to the integrity of elections in Lane County,” Dena Dawson, Lane County clerk, writes in a July 25 letter to the board.
A 2025 redistricting cycle would only add to Lane County Elections’ workload, as it coincides with the Oregon Secretary of State’s efforts to implement new election management and voter registration statewide, alongside a possibility of the state’s first round of ranked-choice voting.
On July 16, the County Commission shot down its own Charter Review Committee’s amendments, voting instead to send the recommendations by Harrang Long to the CRC and county counsel for legal analysis.
The CRC said they could not recommend the Harrang Long proposals be put on the Nov. 5 ballot.
The CRC suggested several changes to the private law firm’s proposal: removing the 2025 mid-cycle redistricting cycle, removing the amendments to county districts — which would have “packed” the Whiteaker neighborhood into the South Eugene district, a classic gerrymandering technique — and requiring the only redistricting committee criteria be a current voter registration in Lane County.
The only unanimous suggestion ignored by the board includes the 2025 redistricting suggestion.
“The anticipated fiscal, voter, and district impacts, including potential confusion, and downstream effects to other districts, underscore the critical nature of our current resource limitations,” Dawson writes.