The redistricting process is underway in Iowa, as the Senate recently voted to reject the first set of congressional redistricting maps.

District 24 Senator Jesse Green is a Republican from Harcourt and the other Senate Republicans voted to reject the maps, while all Senate Democrats voted to accept them. Green says because the Senate voted to not accept the maps, the House cancelled its vote. He says he voted to reject them because there needed to be more compactness and he didn’t have a problem with the population deviation.

“Due to the size of the districts, kind of the lopsidedness, for example with the (U.S. Congressman) Randy Feenstra’s district covers half the state, it just wasn’t comparable in size. Then when you dug deeper into the legislative districts, you saw a similar situation.”

Green says he wasn’t surprised that all Senate Republicans voted to reject the first maps.

“One thing down in the Senate that has historically in recent years been the case is that we are a team, we’re kind of lockstep, we see things similarly, we flush things out in caucus, and our goal is when we walk out of caucus that we’re a united team and we look out for each other.”

Green says the nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency has 14 days to present a new set of maps for the Senate to vote on. He adds, the first set of maps is no longer valid, unless the second maps are also rejected, then there’s a possibility of amending the first map as their third option.