Citizen-Led State Gerrymandering Reforms Start to Show Results
YAY!!!
http://billmoyers.com/2015/07/13/citizen-led-state-gerrymandering-reforms-start-to-show-results/
Citizen-Led State Gerrymandering Reforms Start to Show Results
July 13, 2015
by Michael Li
Partisan gerrymandering has long been a scourge on the American political landscape — a problem that many observers think is only getting worse with the increasingly technologically sophisticated ways to micro-manipulate maps.
But a big win last week for reformers in the Florida Supreme Court shows that citizen-led efforts to fix gerrymandering have teeth and are starting to yield promising results.
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In California and Arizona, voters used ballot propositions to take mapdrawing power away from politicians entirely, giving it instead to an independent body. Although both commissions are still relatively new, much of the early data is promising. Prior to creation of California’s independent commission, Democrats and Republicans had engaged in a “bipartisan gerrymander” to protect incumbents. With technology at their disposal, they were so successful that in 459 elections, only one incumbent legislator or member of Congress lost his or her seat over a 10-year span. Just five percent of the state’s congressional seats, in fact, were even marginally competitive. And despite a growing Latino population, Latinos were effectively locked out of new opportunities for power.
By contrast, the first commission-drawn congressional map successfully increased the number of competitive congressional districts in the state from five percent to 18 percent, while increasing Latino representation. Commission-drawn maps in other states have engendered much less litigation than maps drawn by legislatures.
Buoyed by these results — and by the Supreme Court’s reaffirmation that voters have the power to experiment with ways to rein in redistricting abuses — reformers in Illinois, Michigan, Ohio and South Dakota are already considering ballot initiatives to follow in the footsteps of Arizona, California and Florida. In short, this could be a real reform moment — and a chance for American voters to take power in their own hands to finally end a problem that has dogged the country from its inception.
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