The Interocitor

Reapportionment (one in a series)

The LA Times reports on the new Costa initiative -- this one dealing with legislative and congressional redistricting. For background on the process see Costa's People's Advocate web site. This is Costa's second attempt -- Prop 24 qualified for the ballot in 2000, but the California Supreme Court (Kennard and Brown dissenting), in a wholy unprincipled and rushed decision, yanked it off the ballot and the people never got to vote. Senate v Jones (S083194) 12/13/99

Now Costa and People's Advocate, fresh from their recall victory, are back. The new initiative removes the power to draw election districts from the legislature and creates a panel of 3 retired judges to redraw the districts each decade. The resulting remap would be subject to approval by a statewide election. It also provides that the current, provably gerrymandered, districts would be redrawn in time for the 2006 election.

Is this important? CATO thinks so. The idea of legislators choosing their voters, instead of the other way around, perverts the entire political process. For a legislator to craft his or her own district so that 70% or more of the voters are from his party -- or meet perferred demographic criteria -- in order to guarantee re-election is such an abuse of the process that it really doesn't need further comment. Further, parties themselves, when in control of the legislature, are always tempted to craft districts where their party will likely get a disproporionate number of seats with a given vote. Simply by piling as many of your opponents into as few districts as possible, and back-filling your safe districts with as many opponents as you dare (wasting their vote), a party can return 60 or 70% of the seats with a bare majority of the vote. If done right, you can even retain a large majority of seats after losing the overall partisan vote. Computers make this trivial. The Democrats did this here in the 1980 remap, and the New Jersey Republicans have done this currently. In Texas, the congressional seats have just been remapped, replacing a Democrat gerrymander (where Democrats won a majority of the Congresssional seats with a minority of the vote) with a milder Republican one.

This really needs to stop. The results of the 2004 election are predictable today -- only 3 or 4 seats are in any question. California has had several ballot initiatives regarding this, but it is really pretty hard for most folks to get their minds around such a statisical inside-baseball political process. None has yet passed, and this one will take a LOT of support if it is to suceed. So we lurch from one gerrymander to another, and the people's vote for legislators and Congress is nearly meaningless.

Ted Costa and People's Advocate have their recall sucess behind them to give credibility, and both Governor-elect Schwarzenegger and the Los Angeles Times have stated that they want the gerrymander ended and the power of legislative remap taken out of the hands of the Legislature. But the devil is in the details. The Times has a history of supporting things in principle and opposing them in fact, and the result has been than many reforms the Times claims to favor have died at the ballot box when the Times objected to some detail.

This reform needs to be won this time. Nothing less than free elections in California are at stake. When the Costa initiative comes out for signing, please get a copy and distribute it. Keep the pressure on the Times (and Arnold) to support it. Educate youself on the issue. We need to win.