On February 7, a Kentucky lower state court judge invalidated the state’s new legislative district boundaries. See this story. Filing for the primary will be postponed. Although Kentucky elects its statewide state executive officers in odd years, it elects its legislators in even years, including this year.
The redistricting standards in the Kentucky Constitution were written in 1891, and basically just say don’t split counties, unless a county has more than one district.
The two houses are under opposite party control, and it looks like each took the opportunity to screw the other party. The Democrats control the House, and it was the GOP that sued.
The Republicans are in control of the senate, and took advantage of the overlapping of senate terms to completely move districts to a new area of the state. In this case, they took a district in Lexington, the term of which expires this year and moved it to a rural 8-county district in northern Kentucky. Meanwhile, it moved a district from western Kentucky, whose senator does will serve until 2015 to Lexington county.
So the voters in Lexington won’t be able to vote for a senator, and the current senator from Lexington won’t be able to run for re-election.
The same thing happens in a number of States including California, Wisconsin, Washington, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. In California, 10% of the population (around 4 million persons) will have no senate representation following the 2014 election.
It’s incredible that this practice has never been outlawed as a violation of equal protection.
If States want to have overlapping terms, they should do like Texas and Illinois and elect all senators after reapportionment, and set up the stagger for subsequent decades.