PENDLETON — Nearly 2,000 of McKennon McDonald’s constituents will never vote for her.

Nor will they vote for the other Pendleton city councilor who represents Ward 2, Sally Brandsen. Any candidate who runs against them in the future won’t have luck getting their votes either.

These holdouts aren’t avoiding the ballot because they’re apathetic or protesting the candidates’ politics or policies. Instead, the inmates of Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution and the Umatilla County Jail are in a political gray zone: legally prohibited from voting in elections but still counted toward representation in Congress, the Oregon Legislature and the Pendleton City Council.

While Oregon recently concluded its redistricting process for congressional and legislative seats, the city council hasn’t taken any steps to reconfigure its three wards.

While the ship has sailed on lobbying the Legislature from separating prisoners from the rest of the voting population, one group wants the city to amend its laws to align inmates with where they actually live.

What is prison gerrymandering?

According to its website, the Prison Policy Initiative is a nonpartisan nonprofit that “uses research, advocacy, and organizing to dismantle mass incarceration.” While the group is generally concerned with criminal justice reform, one of the issues it’s most focused on is a practice it calls “prison gerrymandering.”

Gerrymandering is most often used when a governing body draws constituency boundaries to favor one political party over another. For instance, Oregon Republicans recently accused Democrats of gerrymandering the state after proposing and passing political maps that are anticipated to create strong majorities for Democrats in the Legislature and in Oregon’s congressional delegation.

According to the Prison Policy Initiative, prison gerrymandering works by including prisons and county jails as inmates’ place of residence when redistricting instead of the places they lived before they were incarcerated. That means people who live near prisons and county jails are given a greater political voice than those that don’t by using a population of people who can’t vote, pay taxes or otherwise participate in the community they’re incarcerated in.

“It gives certain people who live close to prisons more say in government,” Mike Wessler, the group’s communications director, said in an interview.

The Prison Policy Initiative claims to have ended prison gerrymandering in a dozen states and more than 200 cities. Wessler said Pendleton caught the nonprofit’s attention because it’s one of just two cities in Oregon that use prison population for its political districts.

In 2010, EOCI contained 1,605 inmates and the Umatilla County Jail had 254, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Justice. Given that each ward contained approximately 5,500 people after the council redrew ward lines in 2011, about one-third of Ward 2 constituents were in the custody of the Oregon Department of Corrections or the Umatilla County Sheriff’s Office at the time.

Pendleton’s total inmate population was fairly static from 2010 to 2020, but Wessler said these groups are more transitory than they seem.

About three in four jail inmates are released within 72 hours, according to the American Jail Association. And although prison inmates tend to be incarcerated for longer, the U.S. Department of Justice reported that 42% of inmates in 2018 were released less than a year after entering the prison system. Even inmates with long-term sentences are unlikely to stay in one place, as three-quarters of incarcerated people serve time in more than one facility.

Wessler said the disconnect is compounded by the fact that most inmates return to their home communities after completing their sentence rather than stay in the place where they were incarcerated.

He added that the U.S. Census Bureau made it easier for state’s and communities to filter out jail and prison population data when redistricting. But whether the Pendleton City Council will add redistricting to its agenda is an open question.

Redistricting not on council’s radar

The council last redistricted its wards in 2011 with the help of Portland State University, creating the boundaries that exist today.

In accordance with the Pendleton city charter, the council drew lines for three wards with two councilors representing each of them. The council is rounded off by two at-large councilors and the mayor.

A decade ago, the council approved a map that only made minor changes to the wards. Broadly speaking, Ward 1 covers downtown Pendleton, the South Hill and Riverside, Ward 2 covers the North Hill, Westgate and the Eastern Oregon Regional Airport, and Ward 3 covers everything south of Interstate 84, including Southgate, Tutuilla Road and McKay Creek.

At the time, the map drew a few complaints from residents, but they didn’t concern how Pendleton’s prison and jail would affect representation in Ward 2. Instead, critics honed in on how the base of North Hill was left in Ward 1, opening the door to having most of the council living in one neighborhood.

The council passed the maps nonetheless, and 10 years later, the council have left the wards intact even as other governing bodies adjusted their boundaries. While the city charter does require the council to undergo redistricting from time-to-time, it isn’t tied to the unveiling of the U.S. Census every 10 years like legislative and congressional redistricting is.

“The Council shall, by ordinance, fix the boundaries of the three wards and amend the same whenever required by changed circumstances to assure fair and equitable representation to the citizens of Pendleton,” the charter states.

Mayor John Turner said he would be open to talking about redistricting, including gerrymandering, but it wasn’t high on their priority list. On a scale of 1-10, he rated the issue somewhere between 5-7 in terms of urgency.

McDonald, who represents Ward 2 on the council, said the council is always open to hearing from groups about issues they care about, but she reiterated Turner’s point that the council had been focusing on other topics. She added that this was the first time she had heard about the issue of prison gerrymandering since she started on the council and would need to do more research before forming an opinion.

“It hasn’t come up as a priority, as a thing to do or a thing to change,” she said.

McDonald said she would be interested in studying Pendleton’s population after the 2020 census, especially since Ward 3 has attracted several new housing developments over the past decade. Brandsen, Ward 2’s other councilor, wrote in a text message that she was traveling and deferred to other city officials.

A complicating factor for redistricting is that filing is already open for the 2022 city council elections under the current boundaries. McDonald has already filed to run for a third term.