“Climate now ripe for election reforms”
Virginia Pilot/ November 7, 2007
Virginians may have filled 140 seats in the General Assembly Tuesday, but fewer than two dozen contests could even loosely be defined as competitive.
In some 120 “races,” there was essentially no race at all.
The withering of democracy thanks to the flowering of computer-generated redistricting is a thorn on the political landscape. Not just in Virginia, but all across the country, competitiveness has been wrung out of the system.
As legislative and congressional redistricting approaches after the 2010 census, it’s time to reverse that trend.
Tuesday’s elections, with Republican control of the Senate and House of Delegates narrowing to near-parity with Democrats, create a climate ripe for a new bipartisan accord.
Gov. Tim Kaine, House Speaker Bill Howell, and the next president pro tempore of the Senate should join forces to push the creation of an independent commission to oversee the 2010 redistricting. It’s not just unsporting when a computer uses past voting data to create challenge-proof districts; it also deprives government of the cleansing force that elections are supposed to be.
Beyond that, giving parties a lock on a particular district distorts the nominating process. It’s no longer necessary to appeal to the political middle ground where good policy often forms. Party activists and extremists rule in selecting candidates.
Considerable thought and deliberation need to be given to how this new system would work. The experiences of a dozen states that have gone a more independent route affirm that no plan offers a panacea. For instance, Arizona — which laudably instructs its independent commission to consider “competitiveness” in drawing lines — is still in court over its 2000 redistricting plan. Turns out, there’s a lot of disagreement over what “competitive” means.
Nor should politics ever be completely drained from an inherently political arena. Somebody has to appoint the members of even an independent commission, and usually those “somebodies” have a political slant.
Still, commissions such as Montana’s or Pennsylvania’s, in which majority and minority party leaders select two members each, and the four members combine to pick a fifth, are far less likely to deteriorate into exercises in raw political power.
It’s also essential to adopt safeguards such as guaranteeing that the commission complies with open-meetings laws. Turning redistricting over to a smaller group won’t be progress if that panel can meet in secrecy and fails to include the public in its deliberations.
Fortunately, an assortment of models now exists for a redistricting panel that’s absorbed neither with incumbency protection nor delivering a political stranglehold to one party.
Redistricting will always be a messy, contentious business because so much is at stake. There are better or worse ways to redraw lines, but the anti-competitive soul of our current method turns voters into the biggest losers of all.
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