Prop 77: Easier Said than Done
In the Sunday New York Times Magazine, Dean Murphy describes some of the devils in the details of redistricting. For example, voters say they want competitive districts but they tend to move to areas where their neighbors are politically like-minded:
A top priority of Proposition 77 is to keep cities and counties whole. That would make it very difficult to create many competitive districts because Californians - and most Americans, for that matter - don’t live in politically integrated communities. “It’s not going to lead to a massive transformation, with 50 percent of the seats being competitive, because the state isn’t laid out that way,” Cain said of the measure. The institute’s computer modeling shows, so far, that at most a dozen or so of the state’s 53 Congressional districts could have competitive races.
The problem is not unique to California. Last year, The Austin American-Statesman conducted a county-by-county statistical analysis of presidential election returns since 1948. The survey found that Americans increasingly reside in “landslide counties” - in which a presidential candidate receives at least 60 percent of the vote - and that “political segregation” in counties had grown by 47 percent from 1976 to 2000. The Ohio measure tries to get around partisan clustering by requiring that competitiveness, rather than keeping cities and counties whole, be the most important consideration in drawing a redistricting plan. It even includes a mathematical formula for determining competitiveness.
To achieve districts with a political-party balance in California would require, in some instances, extending lines from the Pacific Ocean to the Nevada border - contortions that conflict with the goal of compactness. Even trying to draw the most competitive map that conformed to the basic principles of equal population and contiguity would require “waiting until the sun exploded for us to find a solution,” as Michael P. McDonald, a redistricting expert and a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution, told me.
