Real redistricting Job #1 - Making legislators responsive to voters would force them to listen to their needs

Buffalo News, The (NY)
May 2, 2006

When demolition experts need to raze a large building, they look for the structure's weak spots: the places where the right explosives bring down the whole enterprise. If ever an American governmental edifice needed razing, it is New York's government center, a place so disconnected from democratic standards that a respected, independent organization recently labeled its Legislature as the nation's most dysfunctional.

Happily, Albany has a weak spot. It is the place where redistricting intersects politics. Separate the two to make elections more competitive, and open a world of possibilities. First and foremost, elected officials are liable to develop a more profound sense of accountability, a change that helps clear the way for other desperately needed reforms on such matters as budgeting, legislating, lobbying, ethics and campaign finance.
Redistricting is the process by which the boundaries of state and federal legislative districts are redrawn to ensure proportional representation by population for each voter. Typically, it happens once a decade, relying on fresh census data.

But New York's system is fatally corrupt. Elected officials long ago hijacked the machinery of redistricting, and in doing so, smashed the very foundation of representative democracy. Politicians pick their voters before the voters pick them. This is done through a process of deal making, where legislative representatives carve odd-shaped districts to maintain strength for incumbent parties. It all adds up to sending the same parties' people back to Albany for as long as they want. Since 1983, some 2,500 state legislative elections resulted in defeat for only 34 incumbents in the general election.

The consequence -- indeed, the point -- is to drain elections of any hint of competitiveness. Instead of contests, elections become coronations, with the real choices made by party voters during primaries. Even those are rare and usually lopsided in New York.

Without competitive general elections, candidates in safe districts are not forced to move toward the political center. Politicians escape accountability and the status quo goes unchallenged. It's a common defect in American democracy, but nowhere are its effects more debilitating than in New York.

The idea of redistricting reform is percolating around the country, including New York, where a Democratic assemblyman from Long Island is pushing the cause. And the state's attorney general, Eliot L. Spitzer, has made redistricting reform a centerpiece of his campaign for governor. He called the present arrangement "unconscionable." Yet even forward-looking states stumbled in their efforts to weed out politics. New York needs to learn from their mistakes.

Two states that made gallant attempts at redistricting enacted flawed systems, themselves, said Michael McDonald, an assistant professor in George Mason University's Department of Public and International Affairs, and an expert in redistricting. In Arizona, the Independent Redistricting Commission is hobbled by an adopted set of priorities that downplays the value of competitiveness, McDonald said, while Iowa allows elected officials to veto the work of a similar commission.

New Yorkers can look a lot closer than the American West to find an example of how to do this right. Canada began the move to independent redistricting half a century ago.

There, the task is slightly different, since districts are allowed to be of different sizes if the variances serve certain other representational goals, but the overriding point is that politicians are no longer in charge of drawing their own districts. Commissions do that work, aiming to create districts that serve the interests of their residents, not the politicians.

It seems beneficial. As of 2004, when a professor in Saskatchewan wrote on the subject for the Election Law Journal, only one redistricting challenge had been heard by Canada's Supreme Court, and that was in 1991. Even less-litigious Canadians' record suggests they are doing something right. So does this: In January's national elections, fueled by scandal and weariness with the ruling Liberal Party, only 78 percent of incumbents were re-elected to Parliament.

Redistricting reform is not a cure-all for New York or any other state where politicians have run roughshod over voters. As McDonald observed, politics has "a lot of moving parts," all of which influence the actions of elected officials. They include the election cycle, local expectations and, especially, the influence of big-money patrons and special-interest groups like the New York State Trial Lawyers Association and SEIU Local 1199, a powerful health-care workers union. But done correctly, the reverberations from redistricting reform can shake the structure like nothing else.

Whatever route independent redistricting takes, 2007-08 will be key to achieving the goal. The first half of a governor's first term is when his energy and political clout are greatest. If voters want to reclaim the power that lawmakers siphoned off, they need to elect a governor who will make this a priority, then pressure him to act.

Redistricting can change only so much, of course. New York is a liberal state, greatly influenced by New York City's Democrats. Fair redistricting cannot change that. Indeed, it will reflect it.

But to the extent that elected officials have to worry about competing ideas from political challengers -- in or out of their own parties -- politicians are likely to become more accountable to the people who pay their salaries. No other reform could pay off as handsomely.

Wednesday: Where are the Republicans?