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Sacramento Bee
Tired of redistricting hijinks? Try statewide
at-large elections
By Mark Paul
December 14, 2003
Everywhere you turn these days,
someone seems to be making a fuss about redistricting.
Democrats in Texas and around the country are steaming over the
power play by Tom DeLay, House majority leader, and Texas
Republicans to redraw Texas districts for the second time this
decade to gerrymander Democrats out of seats and protect GOP control
of the House.
Pennsylvania Democrats were at the U.S. Supreme Court last
Wednesday, arguing that the GOP's gerrymander of House districts in
their state is so lopsided as to be unconstitutional.
Here in California, Ted Costa, the political gadfly who kicked
off the recall against Gray Davis, is angry about the 2001
bipartisan gerrymander that has virtually locked up most legislative
and congressional seats. He has filed an initiative to reform
California's redistricting system.
The complainers are right. Partisan gerrymanders are unfair.
Redistricting plans that go out of their way to make most seats
safe for one party or the other reduce the electorate's ability to
make its voice heard. In next year's House election, as few as 30
seats in 435 may be genuinely competitive.
But even if the complainers were to win at the Supreme Court and
California's ballot box, there's likely to be little change in the
competitiveness of elections or voters' sense of being well
represented. That's because our problem is not just redistricting;
our problem is relying exclusively on districts.
To understand why, just look at a map of where Democrats and
Republicans live in California. (Good maps and data are available
online from the Institute for Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley,
http://swdb.berkeley.edu.) The Bay Area,
Los Angeles and the city centers in the Central Valley are heavily
Democratic; Orange County, the Inland Empire and the new suburbs of
the Valley vote for Republicans.
Given that clumping, it's very hard, even with the best of
intentions, to make more than a handful of districts competitive.
Redistricting reformers like Costa would require districts to be
compact and contiguous and to honor political boundaries. But the
only way to maximize competition in the state is to violate those
rules, tying pieces of cities to distant new suburbs in shotgun
weddings aimed at creating hot races with uncertain outcomes.
Short of that kind of gerrymandering for competition, something
the Costa initiative would bar, the combination of where we live and
how we elect representatives by districts will leave us with the
politics we have now: millions of voters feeling impotent at the
polls and unrepresented in lawmaking bodies.
It doesn't have to be that way. We could revamp how we elect
legislative representatives. And we don't need to look far for good
models.
Most Americans don't know it, but our practice of electing
legislative representatives exclusively by geographic districts with
members elected by plurality isn't written in stone. The
Constitution doesn't require elections by district for the House of
Representatives, and in the first half century of the Republic, many
states elected their House members in statewide at-large elections.
Many of the democracies around the world use other models,
successfully governing themselves with higher levels of voter
engagement than here.
The best cure for the redistricting blues would be to make
redistricting irrelevant: Recreate our outmoded two-house
Legislature as a larger -- say 300 members -- unicameral body
elected half by districts, half statewide by proportional
representation.
This system, known in the trade as mixed-member proportional
representation and recommended by policy experts a decade ago when
constitutional revision was briefly on the California agenda,
combines the best features of electoral systems.
Here's how it works in democracies like Germany and New Zealand:
At legislative elections, citizens have two votes. With their first
vote, they elect the candidates they want to represent their local
districts, as we do now. With their second vote, they pick the party
that reflects their political preferences. Seats in the law-making
body are distributed proportionally to the parties according to the
outcome of this second vote. The first members seated are the
winners of the district elections, with the remainder coming from
lists of candidates put up by the parties.
This system, would be good medicine for many of our political
complaints.
* Gerrymandering would be futile. Since the partisan balance in
the Legislature would be set by the statewide proportional vote,
redistricting might be of interest to individual candidates, but it
could no longer benefit one party over the other.
* Competition would be restored. Control of the Legislature would
rest on a statewide vote, not on 120 districts shaped to
predetermine the outcomes of elections.
* Every vote would count. With today's safe seats, millions of
voters, whether they are Republicans in Davis or Democrats in
Roseville, have no influence over legislative races and no reason
even to vote. Under a mixed-member system, no vote would be wasted,
whether it is cast for a major party or a minor one.
* The Legislature would better reflect California's complexity.
Because every vote counts, parties would have reason to offer
candidates on their lists from every part, socially and
geographically, of the state.
* It would bring legislators closer to the people by reducing the
size of districts. Today, Assembly members represent roughly 450,000
people apiece, more than twice as many people as in the state with
the next largest districts.
We cling reflexively to the single-member districts and plurality
elections we inherited from our British roots. It's tradition. But
it's harder than ever to ignore how unhappy we are with the results,
at the state Capitol and in Congress. Americans used to be the kind
of practical people who, when something didn't work, found something
that did. Maybe we could be again. |
