The Economist: Time To End Gerrymandering
img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-48853" title="IL17_110 (1)" src="/files/wxrimport/2010-10/il17_110-1.jpg" alt="" width="205" height="103" /><The Economist writes:
AMERICAN exceptionalism comes in many forms, but one of the odder ones is the way it sets its electoral boundaries. In every other democracy worthy of the name, independent commissions perform the sensitive and vital task of adjusting boundaries to take account of shifts in population. But in no fewer than 44 of America’s 50 states, it is state legislatures, composed as they are of party politicians, who decide where the lines should be drawn for seats in the House of Representatives in Washington, DC. The potential for abuse is so obvious that it is a kind of miracle that the system has survived as long as it has. But on November 2nd a big blow could be struck against the ancient practice of gerrymandering.
That is when California’s voters will decide whether or not to turn the task over to an independent Citizen Redistricting Commission, laboriously constructed so as to be balanced and independent by a process of screening and random selection. So far only Arizona has anything remotely as good at the congressional level (though some 31 states, including California, have moved in this direction as far as their own state legislative elections are concerned). A further seven states have nominally independent commissions for their congressional seats that are, in practice, partly answerable to the politicians.
The issue is particularly important just now. America is about to publish the results of its decennial census, so 2011 will be a year of haggling over boundaries to reflect the new numbers, a process known as redistricting. That in turn makes November’s elections to state legislatures much more important than usual. In most states the newly elected legislators will be the ones drawing or approving the new lines. If the Republicans do seize control of Congress at this year’s mid-terms, an important part of the reason will be the ways in which their state-level legislators redrew the lines in big states like Texas, Ohio and Florida after the census of 2000.
Letting state legislators control the redistricting process is wrong in several ways.
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