Editorial: Rigging Elections by Redistricting

A Register-Guard Editorial
Published: Saturday, July 1, 2006

http://www.registerguard.com/news/2006/07/01/ed.edit.redistrict.0701.p1.php

The problem is ancient: Bred into the DNA of virtually every elected official are two instincts that dominate all others - the overpowering need to get re-elected, and the survival imperative to expand the size of the tribe.

These primordial urges afflict Democrats and Republicans equally. Doesn't matter who's running the show.

That's why if such pathologically self-interested people are allowed to decide by themselves how to configure the boundaries of legislative and congressional districts, the result is a foregone conclusion. They will use every trick they can get away with to increase their advantage and cripple their opponents.

It's a shamefully effective way to guarantee virtually undefeatable incumbents, and the proof is in the numbers:

• In 2004, the re-election rate for House incumbents was 98.3 percent.

• In California, none of the 173 U.S. House or state legislative seats changed hands.

• One in five congressional candidates in the last general election had no opponent.

Too many citizens are responding to the lack of any meaningful competition by giving up on elections and not casting ballots. That's poisonous to a democracy.

There's no help on the horizon from the U.S. Supreme Court. Presented with a textbook case of abjectly partisan redistricting in Texas masterminded by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, the justices last Wednesday couldn't agree on much of anything, including what constitutes excessively partisan gerrymandering. A majority of the court decided, for widely differing reasons, that DeLay's Texas takeover was legal.

DeLay set about in 2003 to help Republicans capture the legislature in his home state of Texas and then to immediately redraw 32 Texas congressional districts to guarantee Republican dominance of the state's House delegation. He brazenly ignored the practice of redrawing district maps only every 10 years in conjunction with new Census data and commissioned new districts just three years after a previous redis- tricting.

Anyone who doubts the effectiveness of this tactic need only examine DeLay's stunning handiwork: Five incumbent Texas Democrats lost their seats in the 2004 general election, and Republicans captured nearly two-thirds of the state's congressional delegation.

In previous rulings, the Supreme Court has said that egregious gerrymandering could violate the Constitution's equal protection clause. The problem is the court never developed a test against which to measure individual cases to determine if they were unconstitutional. Justices made no headway on creating such a test for the Texas case.

Given the court's quandary, the best solution would be congressional legislation to establish uniform redistricting procedures throughout the nation. Right now, the process varies from state to state, with most empowering state legislatures and governors to draw the boundaries of congressional districts. Some states have adopted much fairer systems that assign the task to nonpartisan, independent commissions.

In Oregon, state legislators have the power to draw House districts, but if they can't agree on a plan, the redistricting job is passed to the secretary of state. Each of Oregon's past three redistricting plans have been drawn by the secretary of state and have won the approval of the Oregon Supreme Court.

Since elected officials have an obvious conflict of interest, redistricting should be handled by independent commissions. Rep. John Tanner, a Democrat from Tennessee, introduced legislation nearly a year ago that would establish a national system of independent redistricting commissions with independent tie- breakers.

No one should hold their breath waiting for a Republican-controlled Congress to embrace the Fairness and Independence in Redistricting Act (House Resolution 2642). Why would they want to upset the status quo? To be fair, if Democrats were in the majority, their current support for Tanner's bill might weaken considerably.

But voter frustration and disillusionment with Congress continue to mount. Some of the blame lies with a blatantly partisan system for redrawing congressional districts - a system that amounts to a legal way to rig elections.

Voters should demand to be treated with more respect.