An Unreliable Way to Realign Voters : Prop. 119 Is No Answer to Reapportionment Abuse

Proposition 119 is the latest in a series of ballot initiatives to deprive politicians of their most political task--drawing new voting districts and, in effect, deciding for themselves which voters they will face.

This is a privilege that politicians abuse every 10 years when new boundaries are drawn to reflect changes in population detected by the federal census. The most common abuse is the swapping of votes to protect incumbents of both parties and to let the party in power keep its edge. Too often in the process, public office becomes a barricade that defies voters and challengers alike.

As with other attempts to lock politics out of the reapportionment process, the battle cry for Proposition 119 is that any approach would be an improvement on the existing system. With past initiatives, that has been a debatable point, but this clearly is not the case with Proposition 119. The mechanics are unwieldy and probably unworkable on the only important issue--keeping politics out of reapportionment.

The heart of the new process would be a 12-member commission. Commissioners would be selected by a panel of retired appellate justices from among nominations by “nonprofit, nonpartisan, public-interest” organizations. The justices themselves would be selected by the state Judicial Council, which works to improve the administration of justice. Public officials, felons and people with “extreme” political views could not be commissioners.

There is at least one loophole big enough to drive a campaign bus through: Any Californian could submit a reapportionment plan, but the commission could choose only the best of the lot. It could not blend the best of one with the best of others.

Commissioners could not be lobbied, legislators would keep their distance from the deliberations and all meetings would be public. Sounds OK, as far as it goes. But the mechanics of this seem to assume that politicians do their own reapportionment work when, in fact, it is done by partisan consultants. Those hired guns spend much of the time between censuses running numbers through computers to test this and that boundary for its effect on their party’s chances of victory in Congress, the state Senate or the Assembly. Here’s the loophole: The bargains that are struck in the political consultants’ workshops would be as private as ever.

It seems unlikely that consultants for either party, knowing that the commission could select just one plan, would submit boundaries that would give them maximum advantage; sitting politicians seldom play winner-takes-all. They compromise. So it is more likely that what a commission would see--and be stuck with--is the same sort of incumbent-friendly plan that the consultants now fashion for the Legislature.

To make the finals, a plan would have to meet as many as a dozen criteria, including a rigid rule against chopping up cities or counties in the process of creating new election districts. This sounds safely antiseptic, but city and county lines often have have no bearing on the pattern of California’s diverse population. In some cases, chopping up a city might be the only way to get a fair reflection of population.

We share the frustration of many Californians at an elected state government that seems more withdrawn from voters each election year. Some of the frustration obviously stems from the way that politicians escape accountability for what they do under the present reapportionment system. But the solution isn’t to turn over the process to a body that is not at all accountable to voters.