Alaska Supreme Court ruling against gerrymandered partisan election district should disqualify Bethany Marcum from serving on UA Board of Regents

The obvious case against legislative confirmation for Bethany Marcum on the University of Alaska Board of Regents got even stronger Friday with a ruling by the Alaska Supreme Court reinforcing the conclusion that she played a key role in unconstitutional gerrymandering while serving on the Alaska Redistricting Board.

Here is the complete 112-page ruling.

The Anchorage Daily News has the best coverage of what will be a major ruling—written by retired Justice Dan Winfree—which explicitly states that partisan gerrymandering in Alaska is unconstitutional. The Alaska Current adds this analysis by Matt Buxton,

The redistricting board had claimed that the Alaska court had “never recognized the viability of a partisan gerrymandering claim.”

As one of five people chosen to help draw election districts, Marcum had called for linking Eagle River to Muldoon for a Senate District K to give Eagle River more representation in the Legislature by controlling a second Senate seat.

As I wrote here in 2021, Marcum no doubt regretted uttering these words on the record as she explained her gerrymandering plan: “This actually gives Eagle River the opportunity for more representation. They’re certainly not going to be disenfranchised by this process,” Marcum said.

Marcum resigned from the redistricting board earlier this year and Dunleavy appointed her to the UA regents for an eight-year term.

There are reasons other than unconstitutional gerrymandering why she is wrong for the regents. A former legislative employee of Dunleavy’s, she applauded his attempt in 2019 to cripple the University of Alaska through budget cuts and vetoes. She can be counted on to support whatever Dunleavy wants at a given moment.

"It is reassuring to see that the administration has embraced fiscal responsibility with this budget," wrote Marcum of the Dunleavy budget in 2019. "Alaskans are tired of deficit spending and this governor clearly means business."

Marcum, the executive director of the right-wing Alaska Policy Forum, supported his campaigns for governor and was named by Dunleavy to the 2020 reapportionment board, a position in which the courts have repeatedly taken her and her GOP allies to task for gerrymandering.

Marcum and the two other Republican members of the redistricting board—John Binkley and Budd Simpson—engaged in gerrymandering by linking Eagle River to South Muldoon to create Senate District K to help Republicans. They mapped the plan to do so in private, according to repeated court rulings, and they ignored public comments.

Melanie Bahnke and Nicole Borromeo opposed the plan and sized up its faults right away.

The Friday ruling by the Supreme Cour reinforces and expands our understanding of the sequence of events and rejects the GOP claim that all this was acceptable and normal.

“The Senate District K’s pairings political undertones are impossible to ignore,” the court said, adding that despite claims by the redistricting board majority to the contrary, “we expressly recognize that partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional under the Alaska Constitution.”

“There is ample evidence of regional and political partisanship in this case,” the court found.

When Marcum said the Senate District K plan would help Eagle River, she “obviously meant that having Eagle River placed in two distinct Senate districts, Eagle River voters could control the election of two senators rather than one,” the Supreme Court said.

The Supreme Court said in a footnote that it found it hard to accept the redistricting board’s claim that it had no chance to explain its reasoning about Senate District K in public.

“Had the board conducted redistricting business in open sessions, the public could have had a real-time understanding of the board members’ positions and reasoning,”the court said.

And the board could have always filed documents with the courts to explain its reasoning to the public, but it didn’t.

Marcum’s leading role in the plan to get more legislative representation than Eagle River deserves based on population disqualifies her from setting higher education policy for Alaska’s university. The Legislature should refuse to confirm her appointment.

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