Gerrymandering

Looks like I have another state to keep an eye on: Montana.  I actually don’t know a great deal about redistricting there, so looks like the research hat is going to come out.  Though I will say that what’s being proposed there is one of the odder solutions to the redistricting problem I’ve seen…

Time Magazine tackles the census issue.  

Is not Gerrymandering according to Matt Yglesias.  And even though I’ve spent the better part of the last three years working on a film about that exact subject, I do happen to agree with his assertion, but with reservations.    

I’ve read the literature - the degree to which gerrymandering directly affects questions of partisan polarization and competition has often been wildly overstated, usually by journalists working without hard statistical tools. In many of our interviews with folks who actually draw district lines, charges of favoritism and collusion between houses and lawmakers have often been met with baffled glances. And even activists working for reform via independent commissions or statutes will readily admit that changes to the system may only create minimal gains in the problem areas.

So, why is this important? And why make a film about it, especially when political documentary of the last decades has found its niche by excavating all of society’s nasty ills and loudly proclaiming the particular issue at hand is THE WORST THING EVER?

A couple of reasons: first, the fights over gerrymandering, for whatever their practical effect on policy (and I will say that as much as I believe in the efficacy of statistical analyses, there’s always some slippage when measuring something like partisanship, or ideology - our numbers are good, but I don’t believe they’re perfect), have ancillary negatives that impact broader perceptual questions about governance. If one reads in the newspaper that parties are fighting tooth and nail over a district map for weeks on end, the battle becomes the thing itself, and the idea of partisan divides and intractable legislatures get firmly implanted in the public mind, even those members of the public who only pay peripheral attention to political minutia. Most voters already harbor these kinds of suspicions; redistricting battles stretching out over years don’t help. Legislators are people too, and just as caught in these feedback loops, if not more so.  And, as far as I’m aware, no one’s devised a metric for how hurt feelings influence policy, so even though the math’s not there, in a process where almost everyone involved ends up annoyed, I don’t think we can safely rule out grudge effects.  

Second, if redistricting DOES turn into a fight, that only means more money will be spent (from software, to lawyers, to consultants and experts, there is a cottage industry around redistricting that is extremely expensive), more time and energy will be expended and less actual governance will happen. Of course, there’s a certain point at which the battle transcends the day-to-day of legislative business and bounces between courts, but doesn’t the judiciary have better things to do? And given that the parties gear up for redistricting so far in advance of apportionment, the year of the actual line-drawing is only a small part of the overall strategic maneuvering. Even if it doesn’t actually do anything, take the tool out of the toolbox and let the legislators focus their attentions elsewhere.

So, redistricting wastes time, costs a lot of money, makes people hate legislators (more than they already do) makes legislators hate each other, and maybe doesn’t really do all that much (though I suspect there are as many who understate its impacts as overstate them) — who cares? There’s a laundry list of governmental activities that accomplish all of these things and more. What really makes redistricting and gerrymandering worthy of a movie is simple: the fight over drawing lines encapsulates nearly all of the questions about the organization of democracy Americans need to be asking. What is representation? Who gets it? How is it best carried out? Do we prefer competition in our elections over voter satisfaction? How do we handle the question if minority rights? Where do the parties fit in? How can we trust the lines we’re given, when, by the time they’ve been drawn, the data is already years out of date?  How do we ensure all votes matter as equally as possible?  (If one gets as far as the last question, they’ll already be confronted with a gaping maw where their eighth grade civics education disappeared into.) 

It’s this stuff, which I’ve likened here to the quantum materials of little-d democracy, that gets dredged up anyone tries to put together a static plan over something as fluid and ever-changing as the American electorate. Gerrymandering, the film, will feature all sorts of claims about the efficacy of this little-known process (including voices who don’t believe it really does all that much), but they’ll be levied on the path to what I hope will be a far-reaching excavation not of some legislatively correctible ill, but of the fundamental questions citizens living under a government by, of and for the people should be asking. If we get that far with even a handful of voters, the film will be, for me, a marked success.

Redistricting and the Census in Louisiana.

Reform is dead in Virginia (for now). 

Layoff notices are going out due to the ongoing budget crisis.  When we interviewed Governor Schwarzenegger over a month ago, he’d just come off of two days of solid negotiating with the legislature and was feeling optimistic at that time.  We’ll get into this in much more detail in the film, but he, and many others we talked to in California, strongly blame the entrenchment brought on by the 2000 sweetheart gerrymander for the issues the state is facing today.    

I’m a few days late in getting this up here, but it bears noting that the Obama administration has moved to take control over the next census in 2010.  This might not seem like major news, but remember that census information is the raw material from which redistricting plans are drawn.  For years minority groups have decried what they have viewed as massive undercounts resulting from Republican-administered tallies, and who knows what metrics Rahm and company will use in trying to deal with fluctuating, hard-to-count inner-city populations.  Given that this is also the first redistricting in decades to happen under a Democratic DoJ, one can’t help but assume there are some pretty serious long-term political machinations at work here.   

For two perspectives, I offer you articles from the Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal

The Florida Supreme Court has cleared the way for the Fair Districts Florida amendments we learned about during our trip to the Sunshine State to move on to the signature stage.  We may head back there to cover this further.  

And, in Virginia,  State Senator Creigh Deeds’s redistricting reform bill has just passed the Senate by a unanimous vote.  This thing was dead in the water as of last summer after it was killed in the House of Delegates.