Ballot issues aimed at getting state legislators out of the redistricting process failed badly this month in California and Ohio. Strange, to say the least.
After the redistricting do-overs in 2003 by Texas and Colorado Republicans, a reasonable person might think voters would be eager to take the highly partisan mapping job out of legislators’ greedy hands.
Apparently not. In these hyper-partisan times, good ideas can fail because voters don’t trust the people proposing them. That cynicism is exploited by expensive, misleading campaign advertising.
In California, “It was driven by this vitriol, this hatred against the governor,” says Pete Maysmith, executive director of Colorado Common Cause. “It’s got a white-hot intensity: Let’s not look at the merits; let’s send a message?”
From a distance, it might seem California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is the sort of Republican who ought to be encouraged – a centrist rather than an absolutist. But his approval ratings in California have crashed. Among Democrats, he’s gone from 54 percent favorable to just 13 percent, and Democrats felt his four initiatives targeted their party’s traditional constituencies.
Common Cause supported the redistricting proposals in California and Ohio, preferring to assign the chore to independent commissions. Despite the initiatives’ failure, Common Cause is still “looking at and interested in” changing Colorado’s method of congressional redistricting, Maysmith said.
“It could work as a referendum,” he added. “We could make the case that legislators realize the current system doesn’t work.”
He concedes that reform might be more acceptable as an initiative. An initiative comes from citizens, at least in theory. A referendum comes from the legislature, and large numbers of voters don’t trust politicians to do the right thing.
But apparently there also are large numbers of voters who think politicians have hijacked the initiative process too, and are using citizen activism as a front.
The California initiative, Schwarzenegger’s idea (hey, he’s a citizen too), was favored by only 40 percent of voters. The Ohio proposal got an embarrassing 30 percent favorable vote. Opponents managed to smear these changes as political power grabs.
Talk about irony. There’s nothing as blatantly and offensively partisan as redistricting when it’s done by legislators. And the last two years have seen ample evidence of that in Texas and Colorado.
The Texas effort got more national attention, and it’s still in the news, thanks to former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. DeLay was involved in suspicious fundraising efforts that enabled Republicans to gain legislative seats in 2002. They used their new clout to redraw congressional district boundaries to their advantage.
The same thing happened in Colorado in the last three days of the 2003 legislative session. One Senate seat had switched in the 2002 election, restoring Republican control of both legislative chambers. That allowed Republicans to push through a last-minute remapping plan that gave them a voter-registration edge in five of the state’s congressional districts.
This was just two years after districts had been redrawn once, as required, after a new U.S. census.
The Colorado Republicans’ substitute plan has lost every court test. The Texas re-redistricting survived, though, allowing the Republicans to gain more seats in Congress.
It’s a mystery why voters think shenanigans like these should be encouraged by letting legislators keep control over congressional redistricting and legislative reapportionment.
The goal in redrawing boundaries is to come as close as possible to equal population in each district. But for politicians, there’s another goal: to make each district as “safe” as possible – to ensure that voter registration figures favor the party in power.
That’s why governance has become more partisan and fruitless, and that’s why it’s a good idea to take the process out of the hands of legislators. They draw lousy maps.
Fred Brown, retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a former national president of the Society of Professional Journalists.
