Redistricting commission votes on new borders for congressional districts

In another private meeting, the Governor’s Redistricting Advisory Commission voted Thursday on new borders for districts on Maryland’s congressional map.

“Tonight, the Governor’s Redistricting Advisory Commission voted to recommend a new congressional map concept to the Governor and the General Assembly,” U.S. Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, a Democrat and the chair of the commission, said in a statement. “This recommendation reflects the work of Marylanders — built from public map submissions, shaped by hours of community feedback, and developed through a transparent redistricting process.”

One commissioner, Senate President Bill Ferguson, D-Baltimore City, disagreed with Alsobrooks’ sentiment, saying “a flawed process has delivered a flawed product.”

“The Governor’s Commission recommended a map today that is objectively unconstitutional and jeopardizes Maryland’s existing map,” Ferguson said in a statement Tuesday evening. “Further, this map fails the Governor’s own test. It breaks apart more neighborhoods and communities than our existing map, and it fails the constitutional requirement of one person, one vote.”

Of Maryland’s eight congressional districts, seven are represented by Democrats. Both of the state’s U.S. senators are Democrats, as well.

The map will now go to the General Assembly for its consideration.

Ferguson said that, “regardless of any disagreement on this issue,” the Senate plans to focus this session on affordability, economic growth and protecting Maryland residents “from an increasingly lawless federal administration.”

In a statement after the vote was cast, House Minority Leader Jason Buckel, R-Allegany, said the Governor’s Redistricting Advisory Commission had “nothing to do with the wants and needs of our citizens, and, quite frankly, nothing to do with Maryland,” but was the result of “D.C. partisan politics and the desires of the Democratic National Committee.”

“This Commission was merely a drawn-out political sham with a pre-determined outcome: to rid Maryland of any Republican representation in Congress and disenfranchise voters in Western Maryland and the Eastern Shore,” Buckel said. “Nothing drives this home more than their absurd end product.”

In November, Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, convened the Governor’s Redistricting Advisory Commission to gauge Marylanders’ interest in redrawing the maps midcycle. 

As first reported by The Baltimore Banner, the commission planned to hold a vote Tuesday on redrawing the state’s congressional district borders in a meeting not open for public view.

Ferguson said Tuesday morning that he has “had concerns about the way that this process has moved forward from the get go,” noting that they haven’t been briefed by legal experts, the state or local boards of elections and have had no “full analysis of any of the maps.”

“It is hard for me to understand how moving forward a map in this context could ever withstand constitutional scrutiny,” Ferguson said. “We’ve not done the basic process that has been required under decades of redistricting processes.”

Tuesday’s meeting is the second instance of the commission taking a consequential vote away from the public eye.

On Dec. 18, the Governor’s Redistricting Advisory Commission voted to recommend that Moore move forward in consideration of a new congressional map, drawing criticism from Ferguson.

“The meeting is scheduled for 5:00 p.m. – it has not happened, but the outcome is already known,” he said in a statement at the time. “Clearly, the Commission’s work was pre-determined from the moment the GRAC was announced.”

“Pushing forward a pre-ordained recommendation outside the public eye is irresponsible and lacks transparency,” Ferguson added.

After the December vote, the commission received 39 maps to consider from members of the public.

In spite of the critique from Ferguson and advocates, Moore defended — and has continued to defend — his Redistricting Advisory Commission as “above-board.”

During an interview with The Daily Record on the first day of the 2026 legislative session, Moore said that, unlike Republican states who have redrawn their maps ahead of the 2030 census, Maryland has undertaken a “transparent … bipartisan process.”

“I think that the work of the commission has been really transparent and remarkable work, and I stand by the fact that they have gone through the process in a way that respects the process that I intended,” Moore said last week.

Ahead of the session, Ferguson raised concern that moving forward with mid-cycle redistricting during the 2026 legislative session would disrupt the Feb. 23 filing deadline for the primary election, saying the state “missed the window to do anything.” 

“[A]nd so to even try it now would be even more constitutionally weak or challenging because we would be putting the court in an impossible place that sets it up for jeopardy,” he said.

Moore disputed Ferguson’s notion last week, saying that the “idea is fictitious on its face.”

“The last time the maps were drawn — do you know that the maps that we’re using right now, do you know when they were concluded?” Moore asked. “In late March. So don’t tell me in mid-January that somehow it’s too late.”

Still, Ferguson remains concerned about the timeline, noting that the litigation of the state’s most recent round of redistricting had begun the month before that legislative session began. He said that the attorney general’s office advised him that it takes “100 to 120 days” to prepare for trial if the map should be challenged — and that doesn’t include any potential appeals.

“I think it’s very important to note that, the last time we went through this in ’21 and ’22, the court case started in December because we passed the map in December,” Ferguson said Tuesday morning. “It was in March that the court made a decision — a court that had already, at that point, kicked the filing deadline back a month and then kicked the primary election date back a month — that was when the map had been passed in December.”

Maryland’s congressional map was redrawn during the 2022 legislative session after the map that was passed by the legislature during a December 2021 special legislative session was challenged by Republicans in Maryland’s Supreme Court.

Former state Supreme Court Judge Lynn A. Battaglia ruled that the 2021 map violated the Maryland Constitution, saying it was “a product of extreme partisan gerrymandering.” The legislature redrew the map by the end of the 2022 legislative session, leading to all contesting parties withdrawing their legal claims.

The state’s current map has never been reviewed by the courts.

“That would mean that, at this point, in the world that something happened, we would be looking at a … filing deadline end of May or June, and then a primary election that’s kicked until September, and then the general election obviously in November,” said Ferguson. “The problem is we can’t hold primary elections in September because overseeing ballot requirements, so the timing issue is even more of a problem now.”