"This new law insures that the process used to redraw legislative district boundaries following the census next year will fully comply with the changes voters made to our Alaska Constitution in 1998," said Senator Tim Kelly (R-Anchorage), who drafted major portions of the measure. "Its provisions allow planning to begin now for the startup of the new redistricting board created by those constitutional changes and provide that board with the tools needed to do the job."

"SB 99 also clarifies questions regarding which numbers from the United States Bureau of the Census will be used by the board," Senator Kelly said. "Some people have been actively arguing that statistical sampling and estimates replace the actual head count of every American in the decennial census. But earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited the use of adjusted or estimated figures in the reapportionment of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives among the states. SB 99 extends the Supreme Court's standard to our state redistricting decisions by directing our new board to use only the results of the actual enumeration of the American people."

Senator Kelly said that SB 99 also outlaws the discriminatory practices used by redistricting boards prior to 1990 to deliberately undercount or ignore members of the Armed Forces serving Alaska. He noted that the 1959 Alaska Constitution directed that only the "civilian" population be considered when the boundaries for State House and State Senate districts were drawn.

"During the 1960s, redistricting boards ignored the presence of members of the Armed Forces completely while later boards assigned various percentage values to members of our military," he explained. In 1970s each soldier, sailor, airman, Marine, and Coast Guardsman in Alaska was counted as 11 percent of a human being, while in the 1980s they were counted as 35 percent of other Alaskans.

"That's the same kind of discrimination used before the Civil War and Emancipation when slaves were recognized as only 60 percent of a human being for Congressional apportionment. I'm proud that Alaska's redistricting boards in the 1990s ended that disgraceful practice and counted members of the military equally with other Alaskans," said Kelly.

"Alaska's voters wisely removed the word 'civilian' from the redistricting section of our state constitution in 1998 because we now recognize that occupational discrimination is just as wrong as discrimination based on race, religion, sex, age, color, or national origin," Kelly said.

"SB 99 establishes a statutory bar to future redistricting discrimination and insures that men and women serving here in our Armed Forces will no longer be treated as second-class Alaskans," said Kelly.