Schwarzenegger's Redistricting Proposal Would Give Power to Unqualified People as a Matter of Law

By Bill Cavala
December 4, 2007


The people have imposed qualifications on public office to make sure that those who run and win have the ability to do the job. Thus you must be an attorney to run for judge or district attorney. And all candidates must be registered voters, a fact that establishes citizenship and residency in a district. Candidates for partisan office must have been registered in their party for a year, and so on.

The latest redistricting initiative - backed by Republican Governor Schwarzenegger - takes the opposite tack. It would have a Commission draw political districts that has no qualifications. Rather, it would exclude everyone who had qualifications.

Commissioners would be chosen by three randomly selected certified auditors, none of whom would have any experience or knowledge of the redistricting process

. These unqualified screeners would then pick a pool of people chosen from those with no experience and with no relations with experience - going back 10 years.

These unqualified voters would be randomly reduced to 14. Ideologically extreme Minority Party Members or indifferent unaligned voters would hold the balance of power on the Commission. This group would choose the staff.

The staff can't be qualified either. Any political experience by a potential staffer - or a relative - would exclude the staff candidate.

So how would an unqualified staff, overseen by an unqualified Commission, chosen by an unqualified auditor produce a plan acceptable to all?

It won't.

So it's likely the new district plan will fail to get the 60% of the votes of even the unqualified Commission.

That would throw redistricting into the hands of judges, an option rejected by the voters as recently as two years ago and five times over the last 20 years.

How is it we can label an effort to deceive the voters a 'reform'?

Bill Cavala was Deputy Director of the Assembly Speaker's Office of Member Services where he worked for over 30 years.

He attended undergraduate and graduate school in the 1960's and received a doctorate in political science at UC Berkeley. He taught political science at UC Berkeley during the 1970's while he worked part-time for the State Assembly.

Cavala left teaching at UC Berkeley and went to work for Assembly Speaker Willie Brown in 1981 until his tenure as Speaker ended in 1995, and he has worked for his five successors as Speaker up to and including Speaker Fabian Nunez.

Mr. Cavala manages election campaigns for Democratic candidates.