Redistricting Reform Has Strong Advocates, Foes
WASHINGTON, Dec. 13 – In 1812, a Massachusetts governor named Eldridge Gerry redrew the state’s congressional districts to benefit his own Democratic-Republican Party and keep the Federalists from gaining power in statewide elections. His districts were extremely odd-looking. One, which stretched from Marblehead through Lynn and Andover and around to Amesbury and Salisbury, avoiding everything in the middle, resembled a salamander so closely that the name stuck. The term gerrymandering was born.
Over the course of United States history, politically motivated redistricting has disenfranchised political and racial minorities, protected incumbents and guarded the perceived interests of states in preserving and enhancing its members’ seniority and power in Congress.
In Massachusetts in the past two decades, congressional and legislative redistricting have been at the center of a string of court cases, as advocacy groups challenge the district maps drawn by the state legislature after each decennial census.
The voter advocacy group Massachusetts Common Cause has spent the past year pushing to transfer responsibility for redistricting from Beacon Hill to an independent panel of seven commissioners chosen by the executive and legislative branches of the state government.
The effort to pass this plan, known as the “Fair Districts Initiative,” began with voter approval of a non-binding question on the 2004 ballot in 15 state legislative districts, and a bill introduced in the House early this year by Rep. Richard T. Moore, Democrat of Uxbridge, which failed to gain the approval of the legislature’s Joint Committee on Election Law.
Common Cause and its partner organizations-including the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts, the NAACP’s New England Conference and MassVote-next launched a petition campaign to start the process to amend the commonwealth constitution, but fell short by 6,000 signatures. The advocates plan to resume their fight through the legislature.
Sen. Edward M. Augustus Jr., Democrat of Worcester, who chairs the Senate Election Law Committee and opposed Mr. Moore’s bill, said that he had no problem with the state legislative districts being set by an independent commission.
For congressional districts, however, he said Democratic Massachusetts should not “unilaterally disarm” when Republican strongholds like Texas continue to redistrict along partisan lines. Power in Congress is often based on seniority, and loss of seniority can mean a loss of valuable chairmanships and payoffs for the home district or state in the form of funds for public projects.
“I’d hate to see us lose a seat on an important committee,” Mr. Augustus said, especially since Massachusetts may soon lose one House seat because of relatively slow population growth.
U.S. Rep. James P. McGovern, Democrat of Worcester, said. “It’s an issue of clout for the state.” If the late Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. were still Speaker of the House, for example, he said, Massachusetts wouldn’t want to redistrict him out and lose a powerful advocate.
Pamela Wilmot, executive director of Massachusetts Common Cause, said congressional and legislative districts are drawn based on who is on the political in with the speaker of the state House and not on who has the most seniority. Besides, she said, if state districts are drawn to protect incumbents because they are powerful, “we might as well abolish all elections.”
“You can’t have it both ways,” she said. “Districts belong to the voters.”
She said the proposed independent commission would not protect incumbents, making them more accountable and boosting competition within the Democratic Party. Incumbents in Massachusetts had “very little to fear” from the loss of privilege, she said, because Massachusetts is so heavily Democratic.
“We’re likely not to see too much change in competition,” Ms. Wilmot said.
“That’s a strange argument for a reform group,” said Rep. Barney Frank, Democrat of New Bedford and the sole congressional endorser of the Fair Districts Initiative. Mr. Frank said that while he still supports the initiative, he has since decided it would be better to have all states change at the same time from redistricting by state legislatures to independent commissions, and he is endorsing a bill to do that introduced by Rep. John S. Tanner, Democrat of Tennessee.
Ms. Wilmot is not optimistic about the chances for a national bill and said that election law is a state matter.
Ms. Wilmot said her group’s initiative was patterned on Iowa’s redistricting commission, which she called “the most successful one in the nation.” In fact, there are some significant differences between the plan proposed for Massachusetts and the one that has served Iowa for three decades.
After a court challenge to its post-1970 redistricting plan, Iowa instituted the Statutory Redistricting Process, which has been in place ever since. This system calls for the majority and minority leaders of the state House and Senate to each nominate one nonpartisan commissioner, who then collectively nominate a fifth commissioner, who chairs the panel. The commission advises the Legislative Services Bureau, a nonpartisan staff of bureaucrats.
The Legislative Services Bureau draws the maps, based on criteria including federal population and antidiscrimination requirements, respect for county and municipal boundaries, contiguity and compactness. The bureau is directed not to pay any attention to political considerations, such as where an incumbent lives.
After it receives census data, the bureau is given two months to draw a map and must conduct public forums on it around the state. It then presents the map to the legislature for an up or down vote, with no amendments. If the first map is rejected, a second is drawn, and then a third. If the third map is rejected, the legislature can amend it.
“Our philosophy is that a blind process is reasonably fair to all parties,” said Ed Cook, legal council for Iowa’s Legislative Services Bureau. He said that the fact that Iowa is pretty evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans plays a role in that fairness. Since it doesn’t favor either party, legislators are generally “pretty happy with the process.”
As far as congressional districts go, said Mr. Cook, there aren’t many maps that can be drawn. The Iowa Constitution forbids dividing counties to create congressional districts; so, with 99 counties in the state, there are only 99 “pieces of the puzzle” to work with. Add to that the federal “one person, one vote” requirement, established in the 1960s, which mandates that districts be roughly equal in population, and options are limited.
Nonetheless, the system has had an impact on Iowa politics. Every 10 years the districts are redrawn from scratch, with no reference to where the old districts were. Sometimes incumbents are paired in a new district and have to run against each other. Sometimes they lose their district altogether, and have to move.
“It’s our version of term limits,” Mr. Cook said.
The party in control of the state legislature changed after the redistricting that followed the censuses of 1980 and 1990, partly because incumbent advantage was largely removed. “There’s potential for more change,” Mr. Cook said.
The Fair Districts Initiative differs from Iowa’s model in that final authority for redistricting would lie with the commission, not the legislature. “Political realities are different” in Massachusetts, Ms. Wilmot said. She said that unlike in Iowa, where there is a tradition of populism and government reform, Common Cause’s assessment of the Massachusetts legislature is that it would reject all the commission’s maps and draw one of its own in the old way, to serve political interests.
Another difference is the guidelines for nominating commissioners. The initiative would mandate that the governor appoint someone from academia; the attorney general nominates a retired judge; the secretary of the commonwealth picks an expert in civil rights; and so forth. Michael Ferrari, a spokesman for Mr. Augustus, said some members of the legislative committee, which rejected Mr. Moore’s bill, were concerned that this constituted writing special interests into the Commonwealth Constitution.
Common Cause’s proposal would be similar to Iowa’s, however, in that it would not make competitiveness a criterion for redistricting. Ms. Wilmot said that “natural competition” was likely to come from not tailoring districts to fit office holders.
David Skaggs, director of the Council for Excellence in Government, a Washington-based nonpartisan organization whose goal is to improve government’s performance on all levels, said that Iowa was “the gold result” for redistricting in the country but that it owed much of its success to its “peculiar political culture,” which was largely incumbent-blind already.
Following a conference held jointly in June with the Campaign Legal Center, another nonpartisan group in Washington that works in the areas of campaign financing, communications and government ethics, the two organizations published a plan for redistricting that Mr. Skaggs said they were trying to sell to states all over the country. It calls for increased competitiveness in districts to be the first priority of independent redistricting commissions.
Mr. Skaggs, who has served in both the Colorado legislature and Congress, said the dwindling number of competitive districts around the country was partly responsible for the growing polarization in Congress and state legislatures.
In districts dominated by one party, he said, primaries become the most important contest, with perhaps 10 percent of the most committed partisan electorate turning out to choose the candidate who then easily wins the general election. There is no incentive for candidates to be moderate.
Ms. Wilmot said that with only 13 percent of Massachusetts voters registered Republican, making competitiveness a criterion was impractical.
The federal Voting Rights Act, passed in 1965 to prevent the disenfranchisement of minorities, has two provisions that concern redistricting. Section 5 requires states that practiced discrimination in the past to submit their redistricting maps to the Department of Justice for approval.
Section 2, which applies to every state, declares that if a minority community is large and compact enough for a district, votes as a group and is regularly defeated by white voters, it can challenge a map that denies it its own district. This happened in Massachusetts in 2003, when the U.S. District Court ruled that a plan drawn by the legislature under Speaker Thomas Finneran, which reduced the number of African-American legislative districts in Boston, was guilty of “sacrificing racial fairness to the voters on the alter of incumbency protection.”
Ms. Wilmot said Worcester’s minority population is “quartered” right now, divided into four legislative districts, both urban and suburban.
Jeffrey M. Wise, who studies redistricting and is a former counsel to the Massachusetts legislature, said it was an issue of competing interests. “You can’t say ‘because it’s in the interest of one party, let’s ignore the Voting Rights Act,’ ” he said. Protecting the votes of racial minorities is an important principle that has taken a long time to establish.
Another concern voiced by some legislators who opposed Mr. Moore’s bill earlier this year was that an independent commission was not elected by the voters.
Alan J. Rom, a lawyer with Massachusetts Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, said he sympathized with the groups calling for an independent commission. “I, better than anybody, understand why they’re doing this,” he said.
Mr. Rom was the plaintiff’s attorney in a series of lawsuits in the 1980s and 1990s brought against the state of Massachusetts for manipulating legislative districts for incumbent benefit. In 1983 and again in 1988 he represented minority political action committees suing over district maps that broke up their communities or packed them all into a few districts to minimize their influence.
Even with his experience with legislative gerrymandering, however, Mr. Rom agrees that redistricting should be left to the people’s representatives.
“Who’s to say commissions would do any better,” Mr. Rom said. Even if the legislature is more apt than disinterested parties to let political considerations influence it, its members can be held accountable by the voters. Unelected commissioners cannot.
“People should hold their representatives accountable,” he said. If they don’t, they are to blame for their lawmakers’ actions.
Mr. Skaggs said redistricting was such an obscure topic that most voters didn’t realize its impact. He thought it was unlikely that any election had ever hinged on a legislator’s role in redistricting legislation. “If you can find one,” he said, “I’ll eat my hat.”
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