How 1,500 Pennsylvanians would slay the gerrymander

• Emily Previti/PA Post
  BioRecent Stories

  

  Emily is a reporter for WITF who’s been covering voting and elections since July 2019 as part of her former role with statehouse accountability news organization PA Post. She was the senior reporter for statewide public media collaboration Keystone Crossroads. Previously, she covered city hall for PennLive/The Patriot-News (Harrisburg, Pa.), was a watchdog and city hall reporter at The Press of Atlantic City and reported for the Northwest Herald. She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.
  
  See other articles by Emily Previti for WITF.

 Submitted

Pennsylvania's congressional map.

From The Context, PA Post’s weekday email newsletter:

Redistricting redux

Submitted

Pennsylvania’s current congressional map was replaced last year by the state Supreme Court after it declared the old one an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.

• Draw The Lines Pa. launched amid the debate over political gerrymandering in Pennsylvania, related lawsuits and the forced replacement of the state’s congressional map with a landmark court decision last year. Recently, the group held a competitive mapathon that drew more than 1,500 submissions. Kaity Kline, Keystone Crossroads, did this story on the winners.

• Right now, the state’s Congressional delegation is split evenly between the two major parties (nine Republicans, nine Democrats) — a significant shift from the prior makeup of 13 Republicans and 5 Democrats. I recently did a story about how that change might have happened even if the map boundaries never did. Read it and explore the interactive map here.

• Check out the OvertheLine? page for more of our redistricting reporting. We’ve been following this issue for years. Please note: it’s still an issue.

Best of the rest

Pat Wellenbach / AP Photo

A new bill in the Pa. State Senate could mean the end for cyber charter schools in the state.

• Thousands of cyber charter school students would have to pay their own tuition out of pocket under a bill re-introduced recently in Harrisburg. WHYY’s Avi Wolfman-Arent explores the possible impacts in this story.

• One of our readers reached out recently through our Listening Postinitiative to ask why are there so many superintendents in Pennsylvania. The short answer: politics. But, as we know, there’s always more to the story. PA Post’s Ed Mahon delves into the nuances here.

• There’s a grassroots effort underway to try to stop UPMC Pinnacle from closing its campus in Lancaster next month. Transforming Health’s Brett Sholtis did this story after sitting in on the group’s attempt to get City Council to take action.