The General Assembly's top leaders have deadlocked on who should cast the likely tie-breaking vote on new legislative maps, Spotlight PA and Votebeat report, setting the stage for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to step in and make the decision for them.

This isn't unusual, nor is it unexpected: Selection of the redistricting panel's chair has fallen to the court in almost every decade since the Legislative Reapportionment Commission was first convened in 1971.

The four caucus leaders who serve on the panel interviewed more than 30 people for the position but said in a letter Friday they were "unable to make a decision."

The state Supreme Court has until May 30 to make its choice, and the person it picks could have major implications for what the state House and Senate maps look like for the next decade.

THE CONTEXT: Gerrymandering — when a map’s district boundaries are manipulated to benefit one political party over another — is often used to describe any number of abuses that occur in redistricting. 

Spotlight PA and Votebeat note it can also be difficult to prove in a legal sense, especially since there’s no one standard to determine whether a map has been gerrymandered, and mapmakers rarely admit to doing it.

But it has been possible to demonstrate in a handful of states, including Pennsylvania, where the state Supreme Court in 2018 found Republicans in charge maximized the number of congressional seats for their party while disadvantaging Democrats.

"We showed that the features of the map could not be explained by anything other than partisan manipulation," said Ben Geffen, an attorney with the Public Interest Law Center who worked on the case.
 
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KEYSTONE AWARDS: Spotlight PA won 11 statewide journalism awards in competition with the largest newsrooms in the state. Not bad for our first full year! The recognized work included stories on the state's COVID-19 business waiver program, a rural shooting fueled by misinformation, Mariner East pipeline safety, diverse sources, and COVID-19 counts. 

MEDIA MENTIONS: Harrisburg public radio station WITF isn't letting lawmakers off the hook for unfounded election denials and is drawing high praise from the Washington Post's media columnist as a result.

MOVIE MAGIC: The "vintage sale of the century" is happening in Latrobe, where a trove of movie and TV props — collected from Pittsburgh's film industry over decades — is up for sale, the Post-Gazette explains.

CITY SHUFFLE: See where Pennsylvanians relocated to during the pandemic, and which Pennsylvania metro areas saw more out-migration than in-migration, with interactive maps from CityLab. 

HORSE WHISPERER: A Pittsburgh boomeranger made close to a billion dollars off an algorithm he created to predict the outcomes of horse races. Bloomberg Businessweek explains how Bill Benter managed the impossible.