Rep. Cristina Parajón (left) and Sen. Harold Pope (right) on Aug. 18 resigned from the New Mexico Redistricting Task Force. (Photos by Austin Fisher and Danielle Prokop / Collage by Julia Goldberg)
Pointing to a national “arms race” around redrawing the maps used to elect members of Congress, two New Mexico lawmakers on Monday resigned from a task force devoted to reforming how the state’s political maps are made.
Rep. Cristina Parajón and Sen. Harold Pope, both Albuquerque Democrats, on Monday resigned from the New Mexico Redistricting Task Force, an independent group convened by Fair Districts for New Mexico, which is affiliated with the nonpartisan advocacy group League of Women Voters New Mexico.
The task force met for the first time earlier this month and its second meeting is scheduled for Tuesday afternoon. Organizers have said the task force’s major focus will be resuming a push to create an independent redistricting commission and divest lawmakers’ authority in redrawing political maps.
That goal comes alongside heightened national attention to “gerrymandering,” in which officials redraw political maps to benefit specific candidates and parties. Efforts by Republican lawmakers in Texas to redistrict mid-decade — versus at the typical start of the decade — has sparked redistricting battles in other states, States Newsroom reports. New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham hosted Democratic members of the Texas House of Representatives last month as they sought support from governors across the country.
In their resignation letters on Monday, Pope and Parajón both cited the national redistricting controversy as the reason for their departures.
“It’s not right to move forward with state-level independent redistricting without action at the national level,” Parajón wrote. She expanded on that thought in an interview with Source, noting that, “If New Mexico were to reform in isolation, while other states continue to manipulate their maps, then our voters are losing their voice at the Congressional level on issues that affect them every single day.” She said she would like to see the state Constitution amended to make redistricting independent, and believes the rest of the task force feels the same way.
Pope told Source NM that his departure has nothing to do with the task force itself.
“It’s not the board; their intentions, I think, are to do the right thing,” Pope said in an interview Tuesday. “But I felt that I can’t be part of this with what’s going on.”
Task Force Co-Chair Rod Kennedy, a former New Mexico Court of Appeals judge and Republican turned Independent, told Source that he’s disappointed in the lawmakers’ decision to leave and wishes they had a better reason for doing so.
“When things outside of redistricting in New Mexico are used as an excuse to say ‘I can’t talk about it here,’ then is it a matter of party over principle? I don’t know,” Kennedy said in an interview. “We just lost two bright, young, talented people.”
Kennedy said the task force will look to replace Parajón and Pope and offer their seats to Democrats in order to reestablish parity between the two major parties.
Sen. Jay Block (R-Rio Rancho), one of the four remaining Republican elected officials on the task force, told Source that he thinks Pope and Parajón’s resignations are hypocritical because the Democratic majority in the Legislature did not entirely follow the Citizen Redistricting Committee’s recommendations the last time it redrew the state’s maps in 2021.
“No one believes these Democrats, especially when they can’t even speak up when the shoe is on the other foot,” Block said in an interview Tuesday. “Give me a break.”
Kennedy said while Pope and Parajón mention Republicans’ gerrymandering in Texas and Ohio in their resignation letters, they don’t mention that the Democrats in California and New York are also preparing to do the same thing.
“There’s four states that are showing that the principles of fair districts are, in a sense, more important than ever,” he said. “It’s a double standard to say, ‘We want fair districts only so long as we’re in the majority and we don’t have to worry about it.’”
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