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Getting Politics Out of Politics?

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The results of the 1990 census still are more than two years away and that loathsome creature, the gerrymander, already has reared its ugly head and is peering around at the political landscape. The gerrymander is the symbol of legislative reapportionment, the redrawing of legislative district lines to reflect population changes, or more to the point, malapportionment, the creation of contorted election districts designed to assure control by one party or the other.

A curious coalition that includes self-annointed populist Paul Gann, former Legislative Analyst A. Alan Post and the League of Women Voters already has begun to circulate an initiative petition that would take reapportionment out of the hands of the state Legislature and give it to a 12-member bipartisan commission.

The plan sounds simple enough and fair enough. To many, it will seem to solve the eternal good-government riddle of getting politics out of reapportionment. The commission would review plans submitted by anyone and choose the one that best satisfies the requirements of the proposed initiative. Ah, therein lies the catch.

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The Gann-Post-League plan contains a complex, detailed set of criteria designed to create compact and highly competitive legislative and congressional districts. This is a noble goal, and the process dictated to the commission by the initiative might create perfect legislative districts geographically. But they may not be the best districts politically. Reapportionment, after all, is a political process and it is impossible--and not necessarily desirable--to remove politics from it altogether.

First, the process stipulates the usual general criteria of a legally acceptable reapportionment plan: geographical compactness, maintenance of community of interest and fair representation for minority groups. But the initiative then goes to much greater lengths in an attempt to achieve seemingly perfect districts. No district can cross certain common boundaries, like the Santa Barbara-Kern and Ventura-Kern county lines. No district may cross a county boundary more than once. Cities cannot be fragmented. District lines cannot be drawn around a population center to get at another population center, according to this formula: “Each Assembly and congressional district shall contain no less than 60% of the population which would be contained in a polygon with the shortest possible perimeter drawn around that Assembly or congressonal district.”

After all that, the initiative then requires that, to the extent possible, districts shall not deviate in voter registration by more than 2% from the statewide proportion of registered Democrats to Republicans. Present districts vary wildly from that formula now, in part because Democratic legislators drew the lines to maintain control in a maximum number of districts and minimize the impact of Republican votes by lumping as many GOP voters into safe GOP seats as possible.

The idea purports to wring partisan politics from reapportionment. Perhaps. But the result still will be partisan, and will not necessarily represent the best common sense. Geographic compactness does not always reflect communal interests. Sections of some cities often have more in common with areas beyond their borders than they do with other areas in their own town. Neat lines do not guarantee equity. The geographic criteria of the initiative could isolate minority groups into enclaves that deny them their share of representation.

California voters have rejected reapportionment commission proposals twice before in this decade. They would do well to maintain a healthy skepticism of anyone who offers a plan to get politics out of reapportionment.

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