For Rhode Island election reform advocates, the problem isn't the firm that was hired to do the study, but the system that gives Assembly leaders effective control over the shape of their colleagues' districts.

PROVIDENCE — Rhode Island has started laying the groundwork to redraw — or as critics would say re-gerrymander — state election boundaries.

While attention is focused on whether the state will lose a congressional seat after the 2020 Census, General Assembly leaders in January quietly approved the latest in a string of contract extensions for election consultant Kimball Brace's company to start compiling voting records and preparing maps for the once-a-decade process of making state legislative districts comport with new population figures.

Brace, who has worked on elections for Rhode Island for nearly four decades, can make up to $285,000 under his latest contract, which runs through the end of June. That would bring the total his firm Election Data Services Inc. has made in Rhode Island since 2016 and the start of this new Census cycle to $650,000, according to invoices provided by the Assembly's Joint Committee on Legislative Services.

And the work is just ramping up.

The legislature has set aside $615,000 in total for "financial consulting services needed for the redistricting process" in the current year budget.

Asked what "financial consulting services" for redistricting are, House spokesman Larry Berman said it was general expenses related to the process, including Brace's work. As is often the case with Assembly budgeting, a large chunk of the money could be rolled over into future year budgets, he said.

Brace's work for Rhode Island legislative leaders dates back to 1982, the year he testified as an expert witness in support of a state Senate map ruled unconstitutional for trying to hurt the election prospects of Republican Lila Sapinsley and Democrat Richard Licht. While Brace's testimony didn't convince the judge the district was fair, it impressed Assembly leaders who hired him to draw the new maps going forward.

What has Brace been doing the past three years in anticipation of the 2020 Census?

For starters, he's been collecting and entering local political boundaries on Census Bureau mapping software, so when the 2020 Census numbers come out, the state will be ready to start adjusting districts. This wasn't done ahead of time for the 2010 Census, when Rhode Island was one of only a few states not to take advantage of the Census mapping software, leading to charges of wasteful spending to create its own tools.

Brace last week told Political Scene his dive into local boundaries found many city and town lines entered in the Census files decades ago had not been precise or accurate, potentially mislocating thousands of residents. Now they are being fixed.

When a U.S. District judge in 2016 ordered Cranston to stop counting Adult Correctional Institutions inmates as residents in its election maps, Brace swooped in to counsel Assembly leaders on the potential implications. House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello's district includes the ACI.

The ruling was eventually overturned on appeal, so nothing had to be redrawn.

The next year, Brace met with Mattiello's chief of staff Leo Skenyon to discuss the "efficiency gap," a recently created measurement of partisan gerrymandering, according to a log of his Rhode Island work provided to Political Scene by the legislature.

Developed by Nicholas Stephanopoulos and Eric McGhee, the efficiency gap tries to show how many of one party's votes have been "wasted" by either being packed into safe districts or dispersed into losing ones. It was used in a 2016 Wisconsin gerrymandering case that made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

While Republican legislatures have drawn the most criticism for gerrymandering, or changing legislative boundaries for political advantage, in their 2015 University of Chicago Law School paper, Stephanopoulos and McGhee called out Rhode Island and Massachusetts as the best examples of strong Democratic gerrymanders.

The Campaign Legal Center, an anti-gerrymandering think tank, estimated that in the 2016 election, gerrymandered district boundaries cost Republicans nine seats in the 113-seat Rhode Island General Assembly. (The Campaign Legal Center said it has not done a similar analysis for the 2018 election, which resulted in the current 14 Republican lawmakers.)

But the affable, bearded Brace, who Comedy Central's "Daily Show" once likened to a Picasso of gerrymandering, rejects the idea that Rhode Island's district boundaries are cynical tools of the ruling Democrats.

"I think it is way off and not the right claim," Brace said last week in a phone interview. "Part of the fallacy of the efficiency gap is it only works when you have two strong parties opposing each other. And that is not always the case in Rhode Island where there are not many Republicans and so many uncontested elections."

In many cases, he noted, the real election takes place in primaries between different Democratic factions, something that wouldn't show up in efficiency gap numbers.

"It is hard to create Republican areas in Rhode Island. I've tried," he said.

Rep. Stephen Ucci, D-Johnston, who chaired the joint redistricting commission for the last Census, agrees and said the primary driver of serpentine district boundaries is the desire to maintain minority representation while respecting community boundaries.

"Absolutely not," Ucci said when asked whether any political considerations went into the last redistricting. "Our priority is not to disenfranchise minority communities."

The most contentious boundary change in the last redistricting round was in the northwest corner of the state. Then House Republican Minority Leader Brian Newberry accused Democratic leaders of a "Keablemander," shifting a boundary to move a potential election opponent's home out of Democratic ex-Rep. Cale Keable's district. (Six years after the redistricting, Keable was ousted by Republican David Place last November.)

"That's complete nonsense," Newberry said about Brace's claim that Rhode Island's boundaries haven't been drawn with politics in mind. "I don't think [Brace] necessarily puts the political spin on it. He provides the data and the information that allows the politicians to figure it out. Going back to 2012, he was the guy who had to go out in public and defend things that I knew for a fact were political."

For Rhode Island election reform advocates, the problem isn't Brace, but the system that gives Assembly leaders effective control over the shape of their colleagues' districts. The Joint Committee on Legislative Services, which Mattiello chairs, hires Brace and the consultant meets frequently with Skenyon and his Senate counterparts, according to his invoices.

Mattiello and Senate President Dominick Ruggerio appoint the members of the Joint Redistricting Committee that oversees the process.

A bill promoted for several years by Common Cause Rhode Island would take control of redistricting out of Assembly leaders' hands and give it to a Citizens Redistricting Commission.

Perhaps in a sign of how unlikely it is to pass, all of the House sponsors are either members of the Reform Caucus who didn't vote for Mattiello or Republicans.

"For generations the General Assembly leadership has outsourced the task of drawing legislative districts to Kim Brace, a consultant out of Virginia," Common Cause Executive Director John Marion wrote in an email Friday. "By at least one measure, the so-called efficiency gap, the Rhode Island state legislative maps are the worst Democratic gerrymander in the nation. Brace's work has proven to be an effective investment for the Democratic General Assembly leadership because it has helped them maintain their significant partisan advantage."

Inaugural money

goes to food bank

In case you missed it: Gov. Gina Raimondo's "inaugural committee'' announced last week that it wrapped up its business with a $50,000 donation to the Rhode Island Community Food Bank.

"We're so thankful to receive this generous gift from Governor Raimondo's Inaugural Committee," said Andrew Schiff, CEO of the Rhode Island Community Food Bank. "With it, we'll be able to purchase healthy, nutritious food for the many Rhode Islanders who struggle to make ends meet during the winter months."

The $50,000 was what was leftover after the committee raised a total of $159,000 from corporate sponsors and spent $106,215 on events, including the invitation-only gala at the State House to celebrate the election and reelection of Rhode Island's top five state officials — including Democrat Raimondo. The total remaining after the $50,000 Food Bank donation: $2,785, according to the governor's press office.

The donors to the festivities included: Laborers' International Union of North America, $20,000; International Game Technology (IGT), Twin River, $15,000 each; Amica, Bank of America, Citizens, CVS, Deepwater Wind, General Dynamics, Electric Boat and Pfizer, $10,000 each; AAA Northeast, Amgen, AT&T, Centene Corp., Dimeo Construction Co., FedEx, First Bristol Corp., JPMorgan Chase, Locke Lord, Microsoft and Washington Trust, up to $5,000.

A side note: Pfizer pledged $10,000, but the donation had not yet been received when the press release went out last week, so it was "not included in the $159,000 total,'' a Raimondo spokeswoman said.