STATE FACES TASK OF REDISTRICTING

Dan Walters
Modesto Bee
December 1, 2000

California's rapid evolution into history's most culturally complex society -- Hispanics will become the state's largest ethnic group within 20 years -- is not being reflected in the political arena.

Three-fourths of Californians who cast ballots this year were Anglos, and Hispanic voting, while increased somewhat from a decade ago, still falls well short of the community's potential, as does that of Asian-Americans. Only among African-Americans does voting come close to population proportions.

What one might term the characteristic gap -- and it extends to such matters as education and income as well as ethnicity -- may be widening. The larger society is changing rapidly, but the body politic is changing slowly.

In the simplest terms, California itself is becoming more culturally diverse and is experiencing a new baby boom, but the politically dominant bloc remains overwhelmingly white and, if anything, is merely getting older. This paradox is an immense, if rarely acknowledged, factor in both political campaigns and the fashioning of political policy.

The most obvious way in which the paradox affects politics is the decennial redrawing of legislative and congressional districts to equalize their populations following a census. Data from the 2000 census will be made available to the states early next year and redistricting is one of the most politically contentious matters facing the California Legislature.

In general, redistricting is supposed to deal with the distribution and makeup of the overall population, while politicians are most concerned about the composition of the roughly one-third of Californians who vote, and with the characteristic gap widening, the reconciliation of those two factors becomes increasingly difficult.

The conundrum lies at the core of a case that was argued before the U.S Supreme Court this week. The Voting Rights Act had compelled states to maximize the opportunities for minority populations to elect representatives -- which is why the number of Hispanic-held seats in the Legislature increased so dramatically in the 1990s despite only slow growth in the number of Hispanic voters.

Such maximization required the designers of the 1991 redistricting plan, which was controlled by the state Supreme Court, to draw lines creating supermajorities of Hispanic residents in districts to offset their lower voting levels.

This mandate, however, has been diluted by a series of Supreme Court rulings saying that extraordinary efforts to draw minority-friendly districts violate the rights of white voters.

With non-Anglos now a majority of California's population, drawing maps that accommodate their aspirations, the continuing fact of white political dominance, individual politicians' desires and the Supreme Court's strictures promises to be an infinitely difficult business.