Court told redistricting 'matter of getting votes'

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

January 7, 2004 Wednesday Home Edition

SECTION: Metro News; Pg. 3B

LENGTH: 481 words

BYLINE: RHONDA COOK

SOURCE: AJC

BODY:
Testimony before three federal judges Tuesday stated the obvious: Redistricting is political.

A Republican lawsuit charges that different-sized congressional and legislative districts drawn by Georgia Democrats violate the one-person, one-vote guarantee of the U.S. Constitution.

With the precision of computers that replaced the "crayons" and rulers of decades ago to draw political lines, it "is entirely possible to draw House and Senate plans with equal distribution" of people in them, said Frank Strickland, one of the lawyers representing 29 Republicans who filed the lawsuit a year ago.

"Today's technology is so fast and sophisticated, not only is it possible to draw plans with zero deviation but to do it in a matter of hours," Strickland argued before U.S. District Court Judges Charles Pannell and William O'Kelley and 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stanley Marcus. "If technology allows drawing of districts with equal populations, why do deviations exist?"

Politics, answered David Walbert, attorney for the state. "There's nothing illegal about what happened" when legislative and congressional boundaries were redrawn after the 2000 census.

"It wasn't a conspiracy. It was a matter of getting . . .votes," Walbert said.

Federal law calls for zero, or at least minimal, deviation in the number of people from one congressional district to the next. But during a special redistricting session of the General Assembly in 2001, only Georgia's 5th Congressional District in Atlanta was designed with exactly the optimum population of 629,727. The differences in the other 12 districts range from as few as two people to as many as 37.

Even so, Republicans represent eight of Georgia's 13 congressional districts.

The federal courts have allowed greater leeway in drawing legislative lines --- plus or minus 5 percent for state House and Senate districts.

Republicans argued in their suit and in court Tuesday that the Democrats, who were in control of the Legislature and the governor's office when the maps were drawn, used that 10-point range to pack GOP voters into a few districts in order to spread Democrats to more of the others.

"Republicans are in overpopulated areas and Democrats are in under-populated areas, and it appears to be by design," testified Ronald Keith Gaddie, a University of Oklahoma political scientist.

"Democrats require fewer votes to win more seats," said Gaddie, called by GOP attorneys as a redistricting expert. "Democrats wanted to protect their own territory, so Republicans were placed in harm's way."

Republicans control the state Senate and the governor's office, but the party has not been able to increase its power through redistricting because Democrats continue its majority in the House.

Senators approved a new map for themselves, but the bill sits unattended in a House committee.