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know I have a short amount of time here today, so I will try to keep it brief. But in 2018 Michigan voters amended the statewide constitution to take the power away from the state legislature in creating statewide district maps and instead into the hands of regular, everyday citizens. This created the Michigan independent citizens redistricting commission, a commission comprised of 13 randomly selected Michigan residents, consisting of four who identify as Democrats, four who identify as Republicans and five who identify as independents. And this commission is tasked with redrawing Michigan's 13 US Congressional seats, 110 House seats and 38 Senate seats. A little bit about our structure. There are about 10,000 applicants who originally applied to be on the commission. Of those, there was a drawing of 200 random individuals. The state then got to strike out a few names, bringing it to 180 and then there was a second random drawing to bring it down to the final 13. The structure is important. It makes it so that no one group can out vote another group, because we have it so that two members of each of these pools, two Democrat, two Republican and two independent 
are needed in order for the commission to pass anything, meaning that, let's say the Democrats and independents can't team up to output the Republicans or the Republicans, the Democrats can't team up to outvote the independents. He truly needed a bipartisan vote in order to pass anything on this commission. And one of the biggest differences between this structure of government compared to what we had before, was the level of transparency that occurred. Every single one of our meetings was live streamed. All of the data was and still is posted on our website. It's all still on YouTube. From the inception of the random drawing process to the map drawing and everything in between, we also had criteria that we had to use to redraw these maps, ranging from equal population and the voting rights act more federal requirements are the top two, but then in bold is where things get a little interesting. In Michigan, having a focus on communities of interest and having no disproportionality as far as political advantage. After those two you get into some of the more traditional redistricting criteria, such as city, county, township boundaries and compactness. Now we first undertook 
this process in 2021 in the midst of the COVID pandemic, there was a delay in census data, and there was a really big time crunch and getting the job done. Nonetheless, we went and held 15 public hearings across the state before we put any pen to paper to hear what Michiganders had to say and what they wanted to see in their new maps. After that, we drew some draft maps and then had a another five public hearings, including here in the city of Detroit, in sum total, there were about 30,000 public comments, ranging from in person to virtual. On our public comment portal, there are multiple ways for people to submit comments. For example, here is just one comment. This individual was talking about a Lakeshore community on the south west side of the state. You can see their comment on the left side and how that district is reflected in the final map on the right. Public input was imperative in this process, and it truly the public's input truly went into the creation of these districts. As I said, in order to pass anything, it took two members of each political demographic, meaning 
that no one demographic could outvote the other. Here are the final maps that were adopted at the end of 2021 we have the chestnut congressional map, the hickory State House map, and the Linden state senate map, some of the results, essentially were that the maps ended up being more proportional politically compared to what we had before. You can see in red what the previous legislative, the previous map drawn by the legislature, was at the higher the number, if it's positive, it means it leans more towards Republicans. If it's a negative, it leans more towards Democrats. We went from a positive 12 efficient efficiency gap in the congressional map to a 0.6% efficiency gap, and it stands to be, mathematically, one of the most fair maps in the country today. You see similar results with the State House and the State Senate plan. And here's some more results from third party adjudicators essentially saying the same thing. The partisan fairness of the map ended up being pretty fair, which is what I think Michiganders wanted when they amended this process. So 
also came with some interesting legislative outcomes. So first democratic Trifecta in 40 years, first black speaker of the house, first female Senate Leader, two black representatives, representing parts of Macomb County for the first time, and also some wins for Detroit, record funding for the city, for DPS, the repeal of right to work, some common sense, gun legislation, all things that I think help Detroit families. Now, clearly more work could have been done. We've heard the mayor talk about CBI and different land value tax structures, and I agree with most of that. But just because more could have been done doesn't mean we shouldn't celebrate some of the progress that's been made. Now we didn't get it all right. There are a lot of lawsuits after we got done, and lawsuits are pretty common in the redistricting process. There were four lawsuits filed by people on both sides of the aisle. The Commission won three of them, and we but we lost the final one, the Aggie V Benson case. In this case, a three Republican judge panel out in West Michigan found that the Commission violated the 14th Amendment of the equal protections clause. I'm sorry, the equal protections Clause of the 14th Amendment by focusing on race and drawing the maps. I've heard some talk that the court found that we violated the VRA. That's actually not what they found. It's kind of the opposite. We used race to try to follow the VRA, but the court said we did that too much, and in doing so, violated the 14th Amendment. Now how one can follow the VRA without looking at race is still a question that I have. Nonetheless, the court ordered us to redraw some of the State House and the State Senate districts. Now this was only for the statewide maps. The Congressional map did not change. I should say, when this happened, there was a real big push by some folks to make it so that the Commission wasn't the entity redrawing the maps instead being drawn by a special master, in my opinion, if that would have come to pass, would have been a real disservice for the citizens of the state, because it would have gone back to being a completely private process with no citizen input, and it would have essentially gone against the statewide amendment that the citizens passed back in 2018 Luckily, the court gave us the opportunity to try to rectify some of the mistakes that were made at this point, shortly after I became chairman of the Commission, and we really tried to put an emphasis on Detroit in the redraw We held meetings at Cass tech Renaissance High School and MLK High School, and successfully adopted new State House and State Senate maps after the Commission adopted said maps, the court then approved them as well. They are now the law. The State House map was used in the past election that 
just took place, and the State Senate map is going to be used in the next Senate election in 2026 and I should say both maps were supported pretty significantly by folks in the city of Detroit and Wayne County in general. Here's the new house map. It is dubbed Motown sound, and you can see it matches up not perfectly, but pretty close to the city council districts that you all just redistricted not too long ago. Now it's not exactly the same. We have to do a statewide redraw, and that involves towns like Hamtramck that are located nested within the city. So it's not exactly the same, but it is quite similar. You can see districts still move across eight mile road, but not quite as much as they did previously, and in a way that I think makes a heck of a lot more sense for the community. And the way we did this was the Court told us to do it in a completely race blind fashion. So we drew them without looking at any sort of racial demographics at all, and then only after they were drawn was a vra analysis undertaken that vra 
that vra analysis showed that in the small town sound map, there were 12 vra districts, some outcomes from the last election that just took place. One there was one more black rep in Miss Tanya Phillips, who won district seven. Now that district was left open by the incumbent in the previous election. But other than that, pretty much all of the same folks. One, you have Regina Weiss and Victoria piazz in house districts five and 10, they both won their new district configurations. In house district eight, Helena Scott and House District 10 to Joe tape, both one and the two Macomb the two reps that were representing parts of Macomb County that I spoke about earlier, Donovan McKinley and Kimberly Scott both won in much more Detroit center districts as well. So it's a little interesting. It seems that the voters elected mostly the same people that was for the house map this election just took place, looking in the future at the Senate map. The Commission adopted this configuration, dubbed crane. It was highly supported by Wayne County, and you can see this map. It adheres to that eight mile boundary a little bit more 
than the State House map did. Now there are opinions on both sides on if that's a good or a bad thing, but this is what the commission ended up adopting. And for the VRA analysis on this, you can see it has four vra districts in districts 136, and seven. As far as the metrics for these maps, they lean a little bit more Republican than the ones adopted in 2021 did, but they are still significantly better than the than what the legislature drew back in the 2010 cycle. And still, experts say are in the realm of fair there are a lot of lessons learned from this process. Hopefully, the next commission in 2030 uses some of the lessons that this commission learn and comes up with an even better result. Some some lessons are the need for more staff, more training, more primary election data in particular, would be extremely useful coming out of this city, because then we can use that data in the configuration of the districts. Another consideration is who applies for these kind of commissions. As you can see, there is a definitely a skew in race and age. So looking forward, perhaps the city of Detroit the next time in 2030 that redistricting happens, can try to get some folks, more folks from here to apply. There were three Detroiters on this commission, myself and two others, by having a diverse commission that represents all of the voices in Michigan, I think is important to have. So about all I got today, I'd be happy to take some questions. I'm sure you all have some. I should say all of this information is located on our website, www.michigan.gov/m, 
