Redistricting Mania

From California to Florida, the move is on to redraw congressional districts that were created just two election cycles ago. Voters sense that politicians drew districts to unfairly rig election results and reduce competition. But the latest reform fad of non-partisan redistricting commissions may not accomplish anything.

It all began with Tom DeLay. DeLay noticed that Texas had become a Republican state, voting 59% for George Bush in the 2000 elections. But 57% of the Texas congressional delegation was Democrats. Why? The district lines were drawn to favor incumbent Democrats. Rather than waiting ten years for the next round of redistricting, DeLay hatched a scheme to take over the Texas legislature and have them redraw district lines immediately. The scheme worked. In the 2004 elections Republicans picked up six congressional seats in Texas. Suddenly, the arcane world of electoral representation is on everyone's mind.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is pushing to create a mid-cycle redistricting commission in California. Like DeLay, Arnold wants to realign representation to better fit his ideology. For Arnold, that means rigging districts to help moderates get elected. Partisans on both sides are up in arms since they'd cut a deal to keep each other's seats safe in the last round of redistricting. The result is that of California's 153 congressional and legislative races, not one changed party hands in the last election.

Not to be outdone, Democrats are getting into the game. They are looking at redistricting initiatives in Illinois, New Mexico and elsewhere.

It's good that we are paying attention to the backroom deals that carved up voters into districts that determine who goes to Congress. Leaving redistricting to politicians is like letting Budweiser and Miller carve up parts of the country where they each get monopolies, leaving beer drinkers no real choices.

But it is naïve to think that independent redistricting commissions will solve our problems. States that have tried the approach, such as Arizona and Iowa, still wind up with most of their races being lopsided in favor of one party or the other.

The challenge is that beyond competition, we have other values such as maintaining geographic communities and accurately representing diverse political viewpoints. Using our current single-member congressional districts, these values conflict with greater competition. To create competitive districts for the conservative voters of Bakersfield, California, for example, you would need to carve up Bakersfield and combine its voters with liberals in Los Angeles. This is exactly what Tom DeLay did to Austin, Texas, resulting in a map that gives Austin no single member of Congress to represent its interest and deprives most its voters of a congressman who accurately represents their political views.

The best solution is to move away from single-member districts that pose the tradeoff between competition and representation. Single-member districts are an improvement upon at-large elections, where all the voters of a state elect all of their representatives together. Most states use at-large systems for the Electoral College. It's winner-take-all proposition, resulting in zero representation for any minority position. So Democrats in Florida or Republicans in Michigan had no representation in the last Electoral College because the other party won those states.

Single-member districts improve representation by clumping voters into like-minded groups and allowing those groups to elect their own member of Congress. Inevitably, many of these districts are less competitive than if the entire state were lumped together in one at-large election. The downside of better representation is safer seats.

The answer would be a form of virtual districting, where voters can in-effect create their own clumps of like-minded people within larger superdistricts that each elect multiple members of congress. Voters could do this with systems where they rank candidates in order of their preference or distribute multiple votes as they wish among multiple candidates. These voting systems, already in use in the US and around the world, provide competition and accurately represent political viewpoints in proportion to their strength in the electorate - a concept known as proportional representation.

Multi-member districts featuring proportional representation are a wonky idea, but perhaps one whose time has come. If efforts to move redistricting decisions into non-partisan panels result in those panels looking beyond single-member districts, only then will they have been worth the wrangling we're about to see over their creation.