Panel should make sense of redistricting

Editorial
Monterey County Herald
December 3, 2010

The goal of California's new redistricting commission should be to produce a new set of legislative and congressional districts that make sense, that are reasonably compact and that keep "communities of interest" reasonably intact.

The goal should not be to make everyone happy or to ensure that each ethnic group is fully represented in each district.

There are signs that advocates for ethnic groups and various special interests could be given undue power to shape the membership of the remaining six seats on the 14-member citizen panel.

The Center for Governmental Studies at the University of California presented a memo at the commission's first meeting this week saying the commissioners need to redouble efforts to balance the makeup as they select the final six.

"Hispanics, whites, males and various geographic areas are as yet underrepresented," the memo said. It recommended that at least two of the next six members to be selected be Latino. It said four should be men and at least one should be a white woman.

We're all for racial and gender equity, but it was our hope the committee members would primarily be exercising math and geography skills and ignoring more political factors to the greatest extent possible.

It will require exceptionally difficult number-crunching to come up with district boundaries that allow various ethnic groups to be fairly represented and enable the election of a representative number of legislators of various backgrounds. It would be harder yet — probably impossible — to create districts that fully satisfy each interest group, and that should not be the aim.

We don't see why it is necessary for the commission to be precisely balanced. The role of the commissioners — all of the commissioners — should be to work toward consensus and logical district boundaries. The process will suffer if they view themselves as representatives of their own ethnic groups or gender, if they allow political correctness to trump logic.

The commission, the result of a statewide ballot measure, replaces the old system that allowed California's legislators to draw the lines. Their chief objective, of course, was to create districts that helped themselves and their political parties.

The result was a jumble of odd-shaped districts that made sense only from a purely partisan perspective. One especially skinny Assembly district stretched from San Jose to Santa Maria.

The commission's work must withstand the scrutiny of federal civil rights officials. They cannot be drawn in ways that dilute the voting impact of Latinos, Asians or other groups.

But if the process turns out to be a power struggle between ethnic and interest groups, it could result in boundaries as illogical as the ones they are to replace.