Minority members present alternate map and question partisan-symmetry testing and datasets

Representative Kamilla Owens and Senator Escamilla presented an alternate congressional map to the Redistricting Committee and said they retained an independent expert to test it. Owens said staff informed them the datasets used by the committee’s primary analyst would be made available; Owens said that dataset arrived the morning of the meeting and would be posted publicly.

Owens and Escamilla said they had hired Dr. Daniel Magleby, who described himself as an academic quantitative political scientist and said his analysis of the Owens–Escamilla map found it “consistent with what we would expect a neutral process to yield.” He said the map splits 13 municipalities and four counties and “falls well within the accepted range of what we would expect from a neutral redistricting process” when…