Leave Redistricting to a CommissionBy Martin Dyckman
Published May 20th 1999 in St. Petersburg Times
If there's one thing that Florida legislators hate more than campaign reform, it's term limits. More than a third of them -- 66, to be precise -- are under the gun next year. For various ulterior motives, however, quite a few would be happy to see the Supreme Court uphold the misguided "Eight is Enough" voter initiative.
At least 15 term-limited House members, for example, are running for the seats of term-limited senators whom they might never have dared to oppose. That's one way to make a virtue of necessity. Senate Democrats, meanwhile, see term limits as a crucial opportunity to regain control or at least a split of the upper chamber, where they are down 15 to 25. Because eight of the 11 term-limited senators are Republicans, Minority Leader Buddy Dyer of Orlando says the Democrats are "quite honestly hoping" that the term limits are allowed to take effect. In that event, he says, "the 2000 election campaign will be the most important election for Democrats in the history of Florida."
Dyer may be overstating the Democrats' chances but not the stakes. Whoever controls the Legislature on Nov. 7, 2000, also controls the legislative and congressional redistricting that must be carried out based on that year's census. There will be nothing altruistic about it. As the U.S. Supreme Court remarked in a 1986 decision, "District lines are rarely neutral phenomena." Given the chance, Dyer worries, the Republicans might easily redistrict the Democrats into permanent obscurity. Just a few map changes in his part of the state could produce three Republican Senate districts where there are now two.
Those aren't idle fears. The U.S. Supreme Court reiterated last week that it is permissible for legislatures to discriminate -- up to a point -- by political party if not by race.
"Our prior decisions have made clear that a jurisdiction may engage in constitutional political gerrymandering, even if it so happens that the most loyal Democrats happen to be black Democrats and even if the state were conscious of that fact," wrote Justice Clarence Thomas in a decision upholding, at least for now, North Carolina's latest attempt to ensure black representation in its congressional delegation.
As Thomas acknowledged in a footnote, however, the limits of political gerrymandering are anything but clear. In the rowdy 1986 case to which he referred, Indiana's new Republican majority had blatantly stiffed the Democrats, who had no votes on the conference committee that wrote the redistricting plan. The court accepted jurisdiction, dismaying conservative justices who said it should stay out of redistricting disputes not involving race or "one-man-one-vote." But then it concluded that Indiana's political gerrymandering wasn't sufficiently outrageous to be overturned and failed conspicuously to say what would be. As with obscenity, the justices seemed to be saying they would know it when they saw it.
Thus every state's redistricting is certain to be appealed by whichever political party thinks it has lost.
The only way to discourage that -- and obtain better government in the bargain -- is to produce a plan that favors communities rather than self-serving legislators and their parties. As the Legislature cannot be trusted, Florida still needs an independent, bipartisan redistricting commission such as at least 10 other states have.
Florida would have one too had the Constitution Revision Commission carried through with a proposal for last November's ballot. It was blocked at the last moment by brutal pressure from Republican leaders in the House.
But not killed. CRC Chairman Dexter Douglass, who calls that "the one that got away," is organizing a meeting in Tallahassee next week to start work on a ballot initiative for the 2000 election. He is hoping for essential financial and grass roots support from teachers unions and trial lawyers, the big losers in this year's legislative wars, and may get it. Jade Moore, executive director of the Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association, says the teachers are "very" interested in that cause. Needless to say, the Democrats should be eager to invest in it, too.
This used to be a Republican cause when they were in the minority, and it was a former Republican legislator, Marilyn Evans-Jones, still faithful to her principles, who fought for it in the CRC last year.
Politics aside, it is good government. With fair districting and campaign reform, there would never have been even the semblance of a case for term limits. With a little luck, some money and a lot of hard work, initiatives to realize both could be on the ballot next year.
Take Redistricting from Political Hands
By MARTIN DYCKMAN Associate Editor
© St. Petersburg Times, published August 19, 1999
Nothing else that comes out of the political sausage factory is as disgusting as the typical redistricting plan. Florida's gag reflex was called into action again this week by the so-called compromise to a lawsuit affecting some South Florida districts.
First, none of the most affected Democrats were on board. It was stupid for the Republicans to treat U.S. Reps. Alcee Hastings, D-Miramar, and Carrie Meek, D-Miami, that way. The GOP may not need Hastings' or Meek's friendship in Washington, but it does need the multitude of minority voters who think highly of Meek and Hastings. For all the Republicans have talked about really, really caring about Florida's black voters, such hardball actions give the lie to all the pretty words.
Second, the Republicans seized the opportunity to carve a bunch of Democratic voters out of the district of Republican Congressman Clay Shaw, R-Fort Lauderdale, who fears a strong challenge next year from State Rep. Elaine Bloom, D-Miami Beach. That should be tried only by people who are sure of getting away with it.
This time, it appears, they may not. There is enough opposition that the three-judge federal court should be deeply suspicious of the deal.
Trying to downplay the partisan implications, Senate Majority Leader Jack Latvala argued that there was "not more than a point or two difference in political performance in anyone's district." Performance? Aside from the fact that even a mere point could be decisive in Shaw's district, Latvala's comment suggested that the authors of the "compromise" were counting votes as well as voters. Tabulations released to the public counted only voters.
This dustup is a timely reminder of why legislators should have as little as possible to do with designing election districts. No matter which party is in charge, they will look out for their own benefit, not the public's. Communities have been split ruthlessly to elect legislators who more often than not have turned out to be small-minded, partisan and parochial.
But for brutal pressure from Republican leaders, Florida would now have an independent redistricting commission. The Constitution Revision Commission caved on this point last year when one member took a walk and another changed his vote.
That fight isn't over. Commission Chairman W. Dexter Douglass and other supporters are attempting to draft an initiative to put before the voters in November 2000. They'll meet in Tallahassee Wednesday to see if they can agree on the language. Assuming they can, they'd shoot for wrapping up the necessary 436,000 signatures with a huge push at polling places during the March 14 presidential primary.
It's so costly and labor-intensive to get that many signatures that most proposed initiatives have died on the vine. The redistricting reformers, however, are counting on help from two sources that have the money, the troops and -- most important -- the motives for taking the Legislature down a peg or two. One is the Academy of Florida Trial Lawyers, still smarting over losing the litigation "reform" debate that generated so much campaign money for the GOP. The other consists of state and local teacher unions, which bitterly resent the Legislature's having adopted Bush's education bill, vouchers and all, virtually as he proposed it.
First, however, the reformers have to agree on the text of an initiative, no small matter. Some, including Douglass, prefer letting the majority and minority forces in the Legislature appoint 16 members of a redistricting commission. Of those 16, 11 would have to agree on a 17th member, or the chief justice would make that critical appointment. But some of the reformers, including Cathy Kelly of the FTP-NEA teachers' union, want the Legislature to have nothing to do with it. They would have the Supreme Court appoint the entire redistricting commission.
"Our involvement will depend on our level of confidence," says Kelly, who added that in any case, "There is so much on the plate that I can't see this would be our first priority."
Anything, even a roomful of chimpanzees with maps and colored pencils, would be better than letting the Legislature directly control redistricting.
At least one teacher leader is gung-ho.
"It is time for our members to learn once again that politics is not a spectator sport," says Jade Moore, executive director of the Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association, who promises to "get the locals energized."
The latest example from the sausage factory should make that somewhat easier.
It Plays Well in Peoria
By MARTIN DYCKMAN Associate Editor
© St. Petersburg Times, published August 22, 1999
Some congressional and state Senate districts in South Florida were artfully drawn to elect blacks and Hispanics. Not by accident, that made some adjacent districts safer for white Republicans. It also left some voters, including a future state Senate candidate, complaining that they had been "deliberately relegated to minority voting status," and a lawsuit resulted.
A proposed settlement came apart last week when the Democrats howled that it would cost them too much and leave future black candidates unable to win the congressional districts currently held by Alcee Hastings and Carrie Meek. If the state goes on to lose the suit, warned GOP state chairman Al Cardenas, "the Democrat Party elite will find that their boasting may have ill-served their cause."
The real culprits, however, are the elite of both parties who refuse to admit that single-member, winner-take-all districting is the worst way to elect minorities -- or, for that matter, anyone -- to legislative assemblies. It marginalizes the minority representatives. It fosters parochialism. It leaves multitudes of voters who supported losing candidates with the sick feeling that they have no one in Washington or the state capital to speak for them.
Decrying this "triumph of tokenism," as she put it, is what cost Lani Guinier her nomination to lead the Justice Department's civil rights division. The civil rights leaders who sat on their hands when only Janet Reno stood up for her can see now how right she was. With the Supreme Court having renounced race-based gerrymandering, nothing else is in play. Federal law actually stipulates single-member districts in Congress. That law needs to be changed.
Even where districting passes legal muster, it may not produce what its supporters expect. Hillsborough County is finding it so hard to draw single-member school board districts that Elections Supervisor Pam Iorio warned last week that the job may not be done in time for the elections.
Voters in Pinellas County will vote Nov. 2 on whether to elect some county commissioners from single-member districts. Assuming that passes, it would still be questionable whether enough black voters could be drawn into any district to assure a black candidate's election.
The solution, as Guinier asserted, is proportional voting within multiple-member districts. It gives each voting group, whether black, Hispanic, Republican or Democratic, a fair chance to be represented by candidates of its choice. Cumulative voting -- which means letting each voter have as many votes as there are seats to be filled -- is the simple key to making it work.
The political elite, however, are inevitably quick to pooh-pooh this as arcane and unworkable, even though it is effectively in use within the United States as well as around the world. The voters can't understand it, they say (and God forbid that they should).
How, they ask smugly, would it play in Peoria?
Very well, thank you.
As it happens, cumulative voting has proved itself a success in Peoria.
"With the election of 1999," reports an article in Election Administration Reports, "cumulative voting appears to have provided the City of Peoria with the balance in representation they have been seeking for a decade."
The plan was adopted in 1991 to settle a voting rights suit. Although the minority population was 16 percent, it had never succeeded in electing more than one black person to the eight-member council, for a success rate of 12.5 percent. Interestingly, Peoria had exactly the mixed sort of at-large and single-member district system proposed for Pinellas.
The solution was to increase the number of at-large seats from four to five and give each voter five votes, which can all be cast for a single candidate if the voter chooses. If the voter picks two candidates, each gets 21/2 votes, and so on. The five candidates with the most total votes win.
Minority voters squandered the first opportunity in 1991 by splitting their votes among three candidates. Ironically, a black candidate they did not support was elected on the strength of white votes.
In 1995 and 1999, the minority community concentrated its votes more carefully and succeeded in electing a favored candidate at large in addition to one elected from a single-member district. This year, the preferred black candidate got the most votes of the nine candidates on the ballot.
So much for the nonsense that the system is hard to understand.
They don't think so in Texas, either. The Amarillo Independent School District recently joined 32 other school districts, along with 16 cities and one hospital district, in deciding to switch to cumulative voting. As elsewhere in Texas, the decision settled a lawsuit filed by Hispanic voters.
Texas may not be progressive in some other regards, but it is leading the nation in cumulative voting.
"Single-member districts were the solution in the old days when minorities were more or less isolated in one of area of town," said Rolando Rios, a civil rights lawyer who represented minority plaintiffs, at a meeting this month in Amarillo. "Cumulative voting allows you to pick up all the minority vote from all over Amarillo."
It also compels each candidate to campaign district-wide and gives virtually every voter at least some degree of success in the election. Texas officials quoted in the Amarillo Globe-News say it has paid the happy dividend of increasing turnout where minorities have caught on that voting is finally worth the effort.
Florida should promptly follow Texas' example, and Peoria's.
http://www.sptimes.com/columns/dyckman.shtml
At least 15 term-limited House members, for example, are running for the seats of term-limited senators whom they might never have dared to oppose. That's one way to make a virtue of necessity. Senate Democrats, meanwhile, see term limits as a crucial opportunity to regain control or at least a split of the upper chamber, where they are down 15 to 25. Because eight of the 11 term-limited senators are Republicans, Minority Leader Buddy Dyer of Orlando says the Democrats are "quite honestly hoping" that the term limits are allowed to take effect. In that event, he says, "the 2000 election campaign will be the most important election for Democrats in the history of Florida."
Dyer may be overstating the Democrats' chances but not the stakes. Whoever controls the Legislature on Nov. 7, 2000, also controls the legislative and congressional redistricting that must be carried out based on that year's census. There will be nothing altruistic about it. As the U.S. Supreme Court remarked in a 1986 decision, "District lines are rarely neutral phenomena." Given the chance, Dyer worries, the Republicans might easily redistrict the Democrats into permanent obscurity. Just a few map changes in his part of the state could produce three Republican Senate districts where there are now two.
Those aren't idle fears. The U.S. Supreme Court reiterated last week that it is permissible for legislatures to discriminate -- up to a point -- by political party if not by race.
"Our prior decisions have made clear that a jurisdiction may engage in constitutional political gerrymandering, even if it so happens that the most loyal Democrats happen to be black Democrats and even if the state were conscious of that fact," wrote Justice Clarence Thomas in a decision upholding, at least for now, North Carolina's latest attempt to ensure black representation in its congressional delegation.
As Thomas acknowledged in a footnote, however, the limits of political gerrymandering are anything but clear. In the rowdy 1986 case to which he referred, Indiana's new Republican majority had blatantly stiffed the Democrats, who had no votes on the conference committee that wrote the redistricting plan. The court accepted jurisdiction, dismaying conservative justices who said it should stay out of redistricting disputes not involving race or "one-man-one-vote." But then it concluded that Indiana's political gerrymandering wasn't sufficiently outrageous to be overturned and failed conspicuously to say what would be. As with obscenity, the justices seemed to be saying they would know it when they saw it.
Thus every state's redistricting is certain to be appealed by whichever political party thinks it has lost.
The only way to discourage that -- and obtain better government in the bargain -- is to produce a plan that favors communities rather than self-serving legislators and their parties. As the Legislature cannot be trusted, Florida still needs an independent, bipartisan redistricting commission such as at least 10 other states have.
Florida would have one too had the Constitution Revision Commission carried through with a proposal for last November's ballot. It was blocked at the last moment by brutal pressure from Republican leaders in the House.
But not killed. CRC Chairman Dexter Douglass, who calls that "the one that got away," is organizing a meeting in Tallahassee next week to start work on a ballot initiative for the 2000 election. He is hoping for essential financial and grass roots support from teachers unions and trial lawyers, the big losers in this year's legislative wars, and may get it. Jade Moore, executive director of the Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association, says the teachers are "very" interested in that cause. Needless to say, the Democrats should be eager to invest in it, too.
This used to be a Republican cause when they were in the minority, and it was a former Republican legislator, Marilyn Evans-Jones, still faithful to her principles, who fought for it in the CRC last year.
Politics aside, it is good government. With fair districting and campaign reform, there would never have been even the semblance of a case for term limits. With a little luck, some money and a lot of hard work, initiatives to realize both could be on the ballot next year.
Take Redistricting from Political Hands
By MARTIN DYCKMAN Associate Editor
© St. Petersburg Times, published August 19, 1999
Nothing else that comes out of the political sausage factory is as disgusting as the typical redistricting plan. Florida's gag reflex was called into action again this week by the so-called compromise to a lawsuit affecting some South Florida districts.
First, none of the most affected Democrats were on board. It was stupid for the Republicans to treat U.S. Reps. Alcee Hastings, D-Miramar, and Carrie Meek, D-Miami, that way. The GOP may not need Hastings' or Meek's friendship in Washington, but it does need the multitude of minority voters who think highly of Meek and Hastings. For all the Republicans have talked about really, really caring about Florida's black voters, such hardball actions give the lie to all the pretty words.
Second, the Republicans seized the opportunity to carve a bunch of Democratic voters out of the district of Republican Congressman Clay Shaw, R-Fort Lauderdale, who fears a strong challenge next year from State Rep. Elaine Bloom, D-Miami Beach. That should be tried only by people who are sure of getting away with it.
This time, it appears, they may not. There is enough opposition that the three-judge federal court should be deeply suspicious of the deal.
Trying to downplay the partisan implications, Senate Majority Leader Jack Latvala argued that there was "not more than a point or two difference in political performance in anyone's district." Performance? Aside from the fact that even a mere point could be decisive in Shaw's district, Latvala's comment suggested that the authors of the "compromise" were counting votes as well as voters. Tabulations released to the public counted only voters.
This dustup is a timely reminder of why legislators should have as little as possible to do with designing election districts. No matter which party is in charge, they will look out for their own benefit, not the public's. Communities have been split ruthlessly to elect legislators who more often than not have turned out to be small-minded, partisan and parochial.
But for brutal pressure from Republican leaders, Florida would now have an independent redistricting commission. The Constitution Revision Commission caved on this point last year when one member took a walk and another changed his vote.
That fight isn't over. Commission Chairman W. Dexter Douglass and other supporters are attempting to draft an initiative to put before the voters in November 2000. They'll meet in Tallahassee Wednesday to see if they can agree on the language. Assuming they can, they'd shoot for wrapping up the necessary 436,000 signatures with a huge push at polling places during the March 14 presidential primary.
It's so costly and labor-intensive to get that many signatures that most proposed initiatives have died on the vine. The redistricting reformers, however, are counting on help from two sources that have the money, the troops and -- most important -- the motives for taking the Legislature down a peg or two. One is the Academy of Florida Trial Lawyers, still smarting over losing the litigation "reform" debate that generated so much campaign money for the GOP. The other consists of state and local teacher unions, which bitterly resent the Legislature's having adopted Bush's education bill, vouchers and all, virtually as he proposed it.
First, however, the reformers have to agree on the text of an initiative, no small matter. Some, including Douglass, prefer letting the majority and minority forces in the Legislature appoint 16 members of a redistricting commission. Of those 16, 11 would have to agree on a 17th member, or the chief justice would make that critical appointment. But some of the reformers, including Cathy Kelly of the FTP-NEA teachers' union, want the Legislature to have nothing to do with it. They would have the Supreme Court appoint the entire redistricting commission.
"Our involvement will depend on our level of confidence," says Kelly, who added that in any case, "There is so much on the plate that I can't see this would be our first priority."
Anything, even a roomful of chimpanzees with maps and colored pencils, would be better than letting the Legislature directly control redistricting.
At least one teacher leader is gung-ho.
"It is time for our members to learn once again that politics is not a spectator sport," says Jade Moore, executive director of the Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association, who promises to "get the locals energized."
The latest example from the sausage factory should make that somewhat easier.
It Plays Well in Peoria
By MARTIN DYCKMAN Associate Editor
© St. Petersburg Times, published August 22, 1999
Some congressional and state Senate districts in South Florida were artfully drawn to elect blacks and Hispanics. Not by accident, that made some adjacent districts safer for white Republicans. It also left some voters, including a future state Senate candidate, complaining that they had been "deliberately relegated to minority voting status," and a lawsuit resulted.
A proposed settlement came apart last week when the Democrats howled that it would cost them too much and leave future black candidates unable to win the congressional districts currently held by Alcee Hastings and Carrie Meek. If the state goes on to lose the suit, warned GOP state chairman Al Cardenas, "the Democrat Party elite will find that their boasting may have ill-served their cause."
The real culprits, however, are the elite of both parties who refuse to admit that single-member, winner-take-all districting is the worst way to elect minorities -- or, for that matter, anyone -- to legislative assemblies. It marginalizes the minority representatives. It fosters parochialism. It leaves multitudes of voters who supported losing candidates with the sick feeling that they have no one in Washington or the state capital to speak for them.
Decrying this "triumph of tokenism," as she put it, is what cost Lani Guinier her nomination to lead the Justice Department's civil rights division. The civil rights leaders who sat on their hands when only Janet Reno stood up for her can see now how right she was. With the Supreme Court having renounced race-based gerrymandering, nothing else is in play. Federal law actually stipulates single-member districts in Congress. That law needs to be changed.
Even where districting passes legal muster, it may not produce what its supporters expect. Hillsborough County is finding it so hard to draw single-member school board districts that Elections Supervisor Pam Iorio warned last week that the job may not be done in time for the elections.
Voters in Pinellas County will vote Nov. 2 on whether to elect some county commissioners from single-member districts. Assuming that passes, it would still be questionable whether enough black voters could be drawn into any district to assure a black candidate's election.
The solution, as Guinier asserted, is proportional voting within multiple-member districts. It gives each voting group, whether black, Hispanic, Republican or Democratic, a fair chance to be represented by candidates of its choice. Cumulative voting -- which means letting each voter have as many votes as there are seats to be filled -- is the simple key to making it work.
The political elite, however, are inevitably quick to pooh-pooh this as arcane and unworkable, even though it is effectively in use within the United States as well as around the world. The voters can't understand it, they say (and God forbid that they should).
How, they ask smugly, would it play in Peoria?
Very well, thank you.
As it happens, cumulative voting has proved itself a success in Peoria.
"With the election of 1999," reports an article in Election Administration Reports, "cumulative voting appears to have provided the City of Peoria with the balance in representation they have been seeking for a decade."
The plan was adopted in 1991 to settle a voting rights suit. Although the minority population was 16 percent, it had never succeeded in electing more than one black person to the eight-member council, for a success rate of 12.5 percent. Interestingly, Peoria had exactly the mixed sort of at-large and single-member district system proposed for Pinellas.
The solution was to increase the number of at-large seats from four to five and give each voter five votes, which can all be cast for a single candidate if the voter chooses. If the voter picks two candidates, each gets 21/2 votes, and so on. The five candidates with the most total votes win.
Minority voters squandered the first opportunity in 1991 by splitting their votes among three candidates. Ironically, a black candidate they did not support was elected on the strength of white votes.
In 1995 and 1999, the minority community concentrated its votes more carefully and succeeded in electing a favored candidate at large in addition to one elected from a single-member district. This year, the preferred black candidate got the most votes of the nine candidates on the ballot.
So much for the nonsense that the system is hard to understand.
They don't think so in Texas, either. The Amarillo Independent School District recently joined 32 other school districts, along with 16 cities and one hospital district, in deciding to switch to cumulative voting. As elsewhere in Texas, the decision settled a lawsuit filed by Hispanic voters.
Texas may not be progressive in some other regards, but it is leading the nation in cumulative voting.
"Single-member districts were the solution in the old days when minorities were more or less isolated in one of area of town," said Rolando Rios, a civil rights lawyer who represented minority plaintiffs, at a meeting this month in Amarillo. "Cumulative voting allows you to pick up all the minority vote from all over Amarillo."
It also compels each candidate to campaign district-wide and gives virtually every voter at least some degree of success in the election. Texas officials quoted in the Amarillo Globe-News say it has paid the happy dividend of increasing turnout where minorities have caught on that voting is finally worth the effort.
Florida should promptly follow Texas' example, and Peoria's.
http://www.sptimes.com/columns/dyckman.shtml
Election Day '09 was a roller-coaster for election reformers. Instant runoff voting had a great night in Minnesota, where St. Paul voters chose to implement IRV for its city elections, and Minneapolis voters used IRV for the first time—with local media touting it as a big success. As the Star-Tribune noted in endorsing IRV for St. Paul, Tuesday’s elections give the Twin Cities a chance to show the whole state of Minnesota the benefits of adopting IRV. There were disappointments in Lowell and Pierce County too, but high-profile multi-candidate races in New Jersey and New York keep policymakers focused on ways to reform elections; the Baltimore Sun and Miami Herald were among many newspapers publishing commentary from FairVote board member and former presidential candidate John Anderson on how IRV can mitigate the problems of plurality elections.