The Maine Legislature on Wednesday ratified legislative and congressional district maps that will define electoral battlegrounds for at least the next decade.
Approval of the new maps for the state Senate, House, congressional and county commissioner districts easily cleared the two-thirds threshold needed.
Overall, the changes are designed to more equally distribute the population among the different districts — 35 in the state Senate, 151 in the House, 16 counties and the state's two congressional districts.
The maps were ratified after a whirlwind of negotiations by Maine's bipartisan redistricting commission, which redrew the boundaries after the latest U.S. Census data showed modest population growth over the past decade — nearly all of it in Southern Maine.
As a result, many Democratic-leaning districts shrunk in geographical area, while Republican ones grew.
That was true in congressional redistricting, which further divided Kennebec County to rebalance the two districts and resulted in moving the state capital of Augusta from the first district into the second.
