San Diego
Union-Tribune
Rigging
elections
The hidden scandal of redistricting
By Steven Hill and Rob Richie
May 23, 2004
Last month the Supreme Court issued a decision with
little fanfare that may have more impact on your representation in
the U.S. Congress than any single event over the past decade. In
Vieth v. Jubilirer, the Court upheld Pennsylvania's congressional
redistricting plan despite all justices agreeing it was a partisan
gerrymander.
The split court – there were five separate opinions – also
did not challenge the fact that legislators around the nation draw
partisan and incumbent protection gerrymanders that leave most
voters without the means to hold their representatives accountable.
But the majority saw no constitutional violation, and the inherent
partisan consequences of any judicially mandated reform suggest that
future courts will also have difficulty rejecting political
gerrymanders. That means change in the status quo now will only come
through the political process: that's you, me and our
representatives elected from gerrymandered districts.
As a quick tutorial, every 10 years after the release of new
census numbers at the start of each decade, all legislative
districts at local, state, and federal levels must be redrawn to
make sure that they are approximately equal in population, which now
means about 640,000 residents per U.S. House district. Some cities
and states have procedures to promote the public interest in this
redistricting process, but most do little to prevent the creation of
a hodgepodge of districts gerrymandered to protect incumbents and
build partisan advantage. With increasingly sophisticated computer
software, polling results and demographic data that have made this
process of unnatural selection much more sophisticated, incumbent
legislators quite literally choose the voters before the voters have
a chance to choose them.
The redistricting plan typically is passed like any legislative
bill, by a majority in both houses and signed by the governor. And
whichever political party controls the line-drawing process in their
state has the godlike power to guarantee themselves majority control
and to decide who will win most races. They rely on techniques with
names like "acking" and "cracking": packing as
many of your opponent's voters into as few districts as possible,
sacrificing those districts but making all the surrounding districts
more favorable to your side; or "cracking" an opponent's
voters into different districts, dividing and conquering as you go.
Does redistricting make a difference? You bet it does. Virginia
Democrats in 2001 won their first statewide race for governor since
1989. But Republicans went from barely controlling the statehouse to
a two-thirds' majority. How? That's right – for the first time
since Reconstruction, Republicans had been able to draw the district
lines before the election. In Florida, Democrats are strong enough
to hold both U.S. Senate seats and gain a virtual tie in the
presidential race. But with full control of rigging the district
lines, Republicans hold an overwhelming 18 of 25 U.S. House seats.
In 2002, Maryland Democrats picked up two of the state's
Republican's four U.S. House seats as a direct result of partisan
redistricting.
The 2001 redistricting was perhaps the most flagrantly rigged
insider's racket in decades.
In California, for example, incumbent U.S. House Democrats paid
$20,000 apiece to a redistricting consultant – the brother of
incumbent Howard Berman – to have "designer districts"
drawn for them. Republicans went along with this cozy arrangement in
exchange for their own safe seats. The result was an unbroken parade
of landslide wins in 2002, with no challenger to any of the 50
incumbents winning even 40 percent of the vote. Nationally, only
four challengers defeated House incumbents in 2002, the fewest in
history, while fewer than one in 10 races were won by competitive
margins inside 55 percent to 45 percent.
Perhaps most perniciously, it's a simple exercise to predict who
will win easily; two days after the November 2002 elections, our
center's biennial Monopoly Politics report projected winners in more
than 80 percent of this year's House races based on a model that has
been accurate in all but one of more than 1,250 projections since
1994.
The lockdown of the U.S. House of Representatives has major
repercussions for our political process and representative
government. Elected every two years, with representatives closer to
the people than senators or the president, the House was designed to
reflect the will and different interests of the nation. The reality
is far different. The growth in seats held by women and people of
color has come to a standstill, leaving women at 14 percent. Hardly
any members can be held electorally accountable, given the lopsided
general elections and the paucity of meaningful primary challenges.
The result is a highly partisan Congress, with most
representatives' voting records closely correlating with the desires
of their party leadership.
Control of the House is nearly as fixed in stone. Since 1954,
control of the House has changed just once, when Newt Gingrich and
Republicans took over after the 1994 elections. Democrats gained a
few seats in each election between 1996 and 2000, but Republicans
cemented their grip in 2002 after dominating redistricting in
several large states. Despite Democrats theoretically needing to
pick up only 12 seats to regain the House, few observers believe
that possible this decade without a dramatic national voter surge.
A win for George W. Bush in 2004 would make it even harder for
Democrats, as it likely would lead to a wave of retirements of
Democratic members whose only chance at influence is a sympathetic
president.
State legislative elections are even less competitive than U.S.
House races. Astoundingly, of the thousands of state legislative
races over the last three election cycles, a whopping 40 percent
were uncontested by one of the two major parties because the
districts are so lopsided it's a waste of campaign resources for the
minority party to contest for these seats. That's two in five races
where the only choice for voters was either to ratify the candidate
of the dominant party or not vote at all. As to partisan control,
not a single legislative chamber changed hands in a state where
incumbents controlled the redistricting process.
Led by House Majority Leader DeLay, Republicans last year brought
the blood sport of redistricting to new lows by spurring Texas and
Colorado to gerrymander congressional districts mid-decade. While
Colorado's Supreme Court tossed out the state's plan, the Texas plan
– and with it potentially a Republican pick-up of seven seats –
won approval. If the Supreme Court accepts the Texas plan, we could
see incumbent legislators fine-tuning their districts after every
election.
So what now? Congress has every right – and indeed
responsibility – to regulate congressional redistricting and
require states to establish nonpartisan commissions that draw lines
based on clear criteria. Not doing so is analogous to allowing
elected officials to count votes in their own elections behind
closed doors.
States also can take action, and, indeed, groups like Common
Cause are contemplating state ballot measures. At the very least,
the redistricting process should be a very public one, with full
disclosure and more media coverage and citizen input. Even better,
take the redistricting process out of the hands of the incumbents
and their parties, and give it to independent bodies that use
non-political criteria for line-drawing. Arizona and Iowa use such
"public interest redistricting" procedure with generally
positive results.
But even with nonpartisan redistricting, the number of
competitive districts around the nation would only rise from today's
dismal one in ten seats to perhaps one in six – and still do
little to boost women and racial minorities. What we ultimately must
do is take on our exclusive reliance on winner-take-all elections.
Winner-take-all allows one side to represent everyone with a simple
majority of the vote. Most enduring democracies have rejected that
model in favor of systems that would ensure a majority of voters
elect a majority of seats, but also represent political minorities.
One example consistent with American traditions comes from
Illinois. For more than a century Illinois voters elected their
state legislature with a full-representation voting method called
cumulative voting, with candidates running in bigger districts that
each had three representatives. Lowering the victory threshold for
candidates from 50 percent to 25 percent didn't overturn the
two-party system but it broadened representation within the parties,
promoted more bipartisan policy and elected more women and racial
minorities.
The Chicago Tribune in 1995 editorialized that "Many
partisans and political independents acknowledge that [cumulative
voting] produced some of the best and brightest in Illinois
politics." Full representation is a win-win for women, racial
minorities and supporters of more partisan fairness and more
competitive elections. With it in place, voters rather than district
lines are the key to defining representation.
The lesson from the Supreme Court is that we must win democracy
in the political process. With voter turnout plummeting and the
"People's House" now gerrymandered to put most of us in
thoroughly noncompetitive districts, we could cancel most
legislative elections and few would notice.
In the 1990s, an angry public lashed out by voting overwhelmingly
for term limits. Now it's time for a drive to give voters real
choices, new voices and fair representation through reforming
redistricting.
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