Sick to death of the current partisanship? Disgusted that unaffiliated voters have so little say in the process? Disillusioned with the same old, same old?
One part of the solution is to make more elections real political contests. To do this we need to drastically change the redistricting process we engage in every decade.
After each 10-year census, the state legislature redivides the state into new congressional districts. The legislature inevitably draws as many safe Republican and safe Democratic districts as possible.
Thus, there is ultimately only one actual political party: the incumbent party. Office-holders love these districts, which have a big majority of their political party.
In 2007, former state Sen. Ken Gordon, D-Denver, tried to reform the redistricting process by getting the legislature to refer to the people a constitutional amendment which, if passed, would have transferred the redistricting process from the legislature to an independent, bipartisan commission.
This commission would have had as one of its mandates the goal of achieving as much political parity and competitiveness in each district as possible.
Gordon, who was the only Democrat to cross party lines and to testify in committee for a similar bill introduced in 2009 by Rep. Mike May, R-Parker, says that when a congressional district is overloaded with members of one party, the “real” election becomes that party’s primary.
According to Americans for Redistricting Reform, only 40 of the 435 congressional seats in America are truly competitive. Colorado’s District 7, constructed judicially in 2002 when the legislature reached a stalemate on its boundaries, is one of them.
Of the other six Colorado districts, two (District 1 and 2) are solidly Democratic. Two (5 and 6) are solidly Republican. Congressional districts 3 and 4 are somewhat competitive, leaning Republican, but with Democrats holding those seats right now.
Despite a court-rejected “end run” attempt in 2003 by the Republican leadership to switch the new district 7 from “swing” to safely Republican, the current Colorado arrangement exhibits more parity than in many states.
But in the four safe districts, the primary election is the election. So the arrangement both disenfranchises unaffiliated voters in the primary and reduces interest in the general.
In fact, in the 2008 election, the winning candidates in the primaries in districts 2, 5 and 6 — Jared Polis, D-Boulder, Doug Lamborn, R-Colorado Springs, and Mike Coffman, R-Aurora — won those primary elections with the votes of between 4 percent and 6 percent of the registered voters.
Redistricting reform efforts like Gordon’s and May’s are not unprecedented. In Washington state, Idaho, Arizona and New Jersey, redistricting is decided by an independent commission. California will vote on such an initiative this year. Iowa, Ohio, New York, Maine and Rhode Island have redistricting commissions, which are advisory only.
It is too late to get any redistricting reform constitutional change on our Colorado ballot. But Gordon says the legislature could pass a bill to require that its own process consider political balance and competitiveness in its boundary setting.
Will it? Probably not. One of the reasons the legislative races, and the governor’s race, are so hot, heavy and impassioned this year, is because the party that can take all three arms of government will rule in redistricting. No politician or party wants to give up such hard-fought power. Only we, the citizens, can force them to do so.
So in November, vote for the person and the party you trust the most. Then, let’s work to get redistricting reform on the ballot soon. By 2020, it will again be too late.
Dottie Lamm, former first lady of Colorado, was Colorado’s 1998 Democratic U.S. Senate candidate.
