Flawed initiative a gambit to confuse voters
By David Graves
Date: September 7, 2007
The year 2011 will mark the 200th anniversary of the attempt by Elbridge Gerry, governor of Massachusetts , to draw legislative districts to favor his party.
His gift to us is the word “gerrymander,” both a noun and a verb, to describe both the convoluted shape of districts drawn to favor one party or another and the process of creating them.
However, the strategy goes back before the founding of the Republic. On Sept. 1, Dan Walters weighed in on legislative redistricting with his column “Devil in the redistricting details.” On Aug. 29, Rep. Mike Thompson weighed in with his opinions on a new initiative, the “Presidential Election Reform Act,” and on Sept. 3, you published what the author, James Clark, must have intended to be a rebuttal to Thompson's piece. The redrawing of electoral districts that occurs in the wake of each decade's census is coming up soon, and while I agree with Walters' assessment that the topic is high on Californians' “MEGO” index (“my eyes glaze over”), I think that he is wide of the mark in a few of his comments.
First, that a legislature in the solid control of one party would consider a plan that would reduce its powers to draw district lines is remarkable, even if a final plan has not appeared. I think Mr. Walters needs to abandon his “inside baseball” perspective and step back a bit and recognize the possibilities of a change. Nor did he mention that the governor's own plan for change was rejected by large majority of voters, only receiving 40 percent approval in the November 2005 special election. Second, Mr. Walters points a finger at both Assembly Speaker Nunez and House Speaker Pelosi for somehow not doing the right thing. Walters is all in favor of non-partisan commissions with no stake in the outcome to reapportion. It was just such a group that had drawn Texas congressional districts after the 2000 census.
Yet not two years later, Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay went on an unprecedented and ultimately successful campaign to redraw lines to create more Republican congressional seats. Where was Mr. Walters then? After the 2000 presidential campaign, where Bush and Gore each took half of the vote in Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan, the Republicans had drawn district lines to capture 51 of 77 seats in Congress — 66 percent. (My source is Professor Bruce Cain, Director of the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies.) Some of the many points Dr. Cain makes about redistricting that we should keep in mind are 1) in some regions, it will be very hard to create competitive seats — Berkeley and Oakland are unlikely to elect a Republican and southern Orange County voters are unlikely to elect a Democrat and 2) natural geographic demarcations and competitive seats may not be able to co-exist, leading to the oft-cited situation of a district boundary running down the middle of a residential street.
As for Mr. Clark's commentary on Sept. 3, it is rambling, confusing and misses the mark. Given the examples above, why would California change its system of granting electoral votes if other, solidly Republican states, continue with a winner-take-all system? If anyone is guilty of what Mr. Clark calls “if you can't win, change the rules,” it is the proponents of this misleadingly-named initiative. I don't think this electoral equivalent of a proposal for unilateral disarmament is anything but a gambit to confuse voters. If we are to reform our way of electing the president and vice president, that discussion should be national, not state by state.