Redistricting and Voting Rights Act ahead

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest. Welcome to a new occasional feature at Votebeat: a chat with Votebeat staffers and outside experts on hot topics in elections. Today, we’re chatting about redistricting with Harvard Law School professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos, co-founder of the redistricting website PlanScore, and Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt, who runs the website All About Redistricting. The transcript below has been edited for clarity and brevity. Nathaniel Rakich (managing editor, Votebeat): Redistricting usually happens in years ending in -1 and -2, as congressional districts are resized to account for the most recent population data from the U.S. Census (which happens at the start of every decade). But over the past year, several states have broken with precedent and decided to redraw their congressional districts in the middle of t