Henderson’s serial redistricting could prompt ballot question redux

(Photo: Dana Gentry/Nevada Current)

The Henderson City Council redrew its ward boundaries last week for the seventh time in the last 15 years, a practice critics contend allows the council to skew elections to the advantage of its favored candidates and cause confusion among voters. 

Now the practice of frequent redistricting is raising the possibility that a stalled ballot measure to create an independent redistricting commission in Nevada could be resurrected, and if successful, trickle down to local governments.

Councilwoman Carrie Cox, who is running for reelection next year, suggests the council is rejiggering the maps with an eye toward boosting prospects for her opponent, Nevada State Board of Education member Annette Dawson Owens, who has been endorsed by Cox’s fellow council members.

“When you have colleagues that do the things that I’ve had done to me, it’s an easy trip to know that something’s going on,” Cox said at the City Council meeting Tuesday, where she cast the lone vote against the redistricting plan recommended by staff.

Bad blood flows freely on the Henderson Council. 

“Every two weeks there’s a pattern, if you haven’t figured it out, with a false narrative right before a City Council meeting,” Councilwoman Monica Larson, the newest member of the council, said from the dais, referring to Cox. “The narrative spun was gerrymandering, but what I appropriately call it is grandstanding.”

“That’s absolutely not true,” Cox said Friday. “Review the City Council meeting recordings on the website. The only pattern is the rest of the council voting against me when I stand up for my constituents.” 

Larson, a California transplant, campaigned last year on the promise of aligning with Cox to turn back an “insular cabal” — a Las Vegas Review-Journal reference in its 2024 endorsement of Larson — of Mayor Michelle Romero and three council members who routinely voted in lockstep. 

Instead of teaming with Cox, Larson cozied up to Romero, Councilman Dan Stewart, and Councilman Jim Seebock. 

On Wednesday, Romero called out Cox’s campaign for issuing a news release that asserts there is “strong evidence that the mayor had authorized the use of internally crafted population estimates” for the redistricting effort.   

“Either the person making these statements has a profound lack of understanding of both our charter and our city operations, or they have purposefully misled the public with these statements,” Romero said. 

Reapportionment and redistricting efforts are conducted nationwide every ten years, following the completion of the U.S. Census, to ensure congressional and legislative districts represent roughly the same amount of residents.  

Unlike most Nevada municipalities, which rely on the Census to determine population, in 2013, Henderson, the second-fastest growing city in Nevada at the time (behind Las Vegas), won legislative approval to change its charter to let the city’s own demographer estimate each ward’s population. When the number of residents in one ward varies by more than 5% from another, the city must redraw its maps. 

The population of Ward Three exceeds that of Ward Four by 7.8% and the population of Ward Two exceeds that of Ward Four by 5.6%, according to Henderson’s longtime Demographer Andy Powell.  

“If we were, for instance, to go 10 years without redistricting, given the high rate of growth that we’ve seen, we could see upwards of 20, 25% difference in population between some of some of the wards, and that would effectively serve to dilute the voting power” of residents in faster-growing wards, Powell said at Wednesday’s meeting. 

The city redrew its ward maps in 2010, 2012, 2014, 2018, 2021, 2023, and 2025.

Cox says this is the second time Henderson has tweaked her ward since she was elected in 2022. 

“They once again tried to move over 40,000 residents, many of them my voters,” she said Friday.   

Henderson grew by 22% in the decade ending December 2023, according to a study based on the U.S. Census data. But growth has slowed. For the year ending in June 2024, the most recent data available from the state demographer, Henderson’s population of 350,706 grew by 2.6%. 

City staff presented two redistricting options to the council. 

Plan One would have affected 40,000 residents, or 11% of the population by moving a dozen precincts. Three precincts that were moved in 2023 would have moved again. 

Plan Two accomplished the same goal of reducing the disparity between ward population by moving one precinct of roughly 4,500 residents (1.4% of the city’s population) out of Cox’s Ward Three. 

The two plans submitted to the council by Henderson staff raise questions about the motivation behind the redistricting effort and the veracity of the city’s internal estimates, which some experts challenged. 

Voting rights advocate Sondra Cosgrove, among others, wondered why Henderson officials floated a plan to move 40,000 residents when the alternative — moving 4,500 residents to another ward — achieves the same outcome. 

“City staff followed industry best practices and the City Charter requirements to develop the proposed redistricting maps,” Henderson spokeswoman Madeleine Skains said via email. “Staff selected two plans for consideration because they minimize impact, best achieve population balance and align with the best practices and Charter requirements. Both plans were provided to give City Council options to balancing these priorities.”

Romero, who is also seeking reelection next year, did not respond to inquiries about whether she requested two plans. 

“I cannot see how moving one precinct from one ward into another is political,” Stewart said, as he made a motion to approve Plan Two, which passed four to one. 

Former Henderson Police Chief Hollie Chadwick, who is challenging Romero in the race for mayor, declined to say whether she believes Henderson should return to redistricting every 10 years. 

“If you’re continually being moved between one ward and another, voters don’t know who represents them,” says Cosgrove, a College of Southern Nevada professor who heads up Fair Maps Nevada PAC. The group has unsuccessfully tried to let voters decide if an independent redistricting commission is better suited than state lawmakers to draw the lines for legislative and congressional districts. 

In 2020, the pandemic put a crimp in Fair Map’s effort to collect signatures to put the redistricting revamp on the ballot. In 2024, the Nevada Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that struck down two similar initiatives slated for the ballot that year. The ruling in favor of a Democratic voter found the measures created a commission with no source of funding. 

Although the ballot measure doesn’t affect redistricting of local governments, Cosgrove says given the power of the state in Nevada over local governments, a successful effort to include a redistricting commission in the constitution could prompt the Legislature to direct cities and counties to follow suit, and redraw maps every 10 years. 

Sept. 1 is the first day to file constitutional amendment ballot questions. 

“We’ve been going back and forth about what’s the best approach to not get sued,” Cosgrove said Thursday regarding the measure’s potential ressurrection. “And right now, I don’t care about that anymore. Based on what’s happening in Texas, everybody sees how bad it is.”

An exodus last week of Texas Democratic lawmakers, who are attempting to block a vote on a redistricting effort intended to shore up Pres. Donald Trump’s Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, prompted Gov. Greg Abbott to threaten the lawmakers with arrest.