(Fwd) Voting rights, gerrymandering and PR

[Steve Eppley]

------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
Date:          18 Jun 96 23:16:50 EDT
From:          Robert D Richie <75377.1623 at compuserve.com>
To:            a few dozen people
Subject:       Copy of: Voting rights, gerrymandering and PR


6/18/96

To:   Members of the Center for Voting and Democracy and those
      interested in fair electoral democracy

From: Rob Richie, Executive Director, CV&D

Greetings!

    There have been important election and voting system developments 
since our May 24th update. We will send out an update discussing
these developments shortly, but the June 13th decision by the Supreme
Court to throw out alleged "racial gerrymanders" in congressional
districts plans in Texas and North Carolina deserves special attention.

    The majority opinions in the 5-4 decisions are full of contradictions.
Particularly important ones are: 

    * All of the condemnation falls on a handful of majority minority 
districts, yet nearly every district in both states was designed to
shield incumbents and maximize party advantage -- in general quite
successfully, as spelled out below. Proportional voting systems
would provide fair minority representation while giving all voters
the increased choice and fair competition they clearly want.

    * With black and Latino majorities, these districts elected Members
different than those usually elected in these states -- both in color and
in ideology. The voters in these districts did not do so because they
were forced to vote this way; rather, they finally were given an opportunity
to elect the kinds of candidates they almost certainly would have preferred
in the past. Why should these voters now be forced to go back to "second 
best" (if lucky) representation? Why should this representation only have
been "revealed" in redistricting rather than in letting more voters define 
their own representation? Why shouldn't all voters -- not just those lucky
enough to be put in the right kind of districts -- have this opportunity?

   * States and localies now will be sued no matter what they do with a single-
seat district plan. Of course they would meet both the standards of the Voting
Rights Act and the new standards against "racial gerrymanders" by going to
proportional voting systems. And why not? Last night I was on a cable television
program with, among others, Rep. James Clyburn and Abigail Thernstrom. Rep. 
Clyburn and Ms. Thernstrom had very different views on black majority districts,
but Thernstrom gave a cautious thumbs up to proportional systems and Clyburn
a ringing, passionate endorsement. We have found this phenomenon repeated 
several times elsewhere.

    As a favor, if anyone heard interesting comments or saw commentaries about 
these rulings that directly mentioned the option of proportional voting 
systems or cumulative voting, I would appreciate hearing about them. And as
a reminder, please make sure to find out where your representative in the
U.S. House stands on HR 2545, the Voters' Choice Act, which would lift the
1967-imposed single-seat district mandate if a state used one of the three
proportional systems used in U.S. local elections.

    Following are three pieces I hope you will find of interest:

1. A commentary in reaction to the rulings by John Anderson, President
of the Center for Voting and Democracy. Please feel free to submit
it to your local newspaper (although not in Texas or North Carolina).

2. Long quotes from commentaries in the Chicago Tribune (by syndicated
columnst Clarence Page) and the New York Times

3. Key excerpts from Justice John Paul Stevens' dissent in the Texas
redistricting case that focus on political gerrymandering.

                        **********************************

               The Gerrymandering Scam: Focus on the Forest
                            By John B. Anderson

         By rejecting congressional districting plans from North
Carolina and Texas, the Supreme Court for the fourth straight
year has sparked a loud and bitter debate over the
constitutionality of so-called "racial gerrymandering."
Unfortunately, the shouting obscures perhaps the most important
question raised by the controversy: just why should those drawing
districts have more power over who wins and loses than the
voters themselves?

         The Texas districts powerfully demonstrate this
uncomfortable truth. In his dissent against the 5-4 majority in
Bush v. Vera, Justice John Paul Stevens explains clearly how the
Texas legislature used the latest computer technology to piece
districts together, block by block, to protect incumbents and
maximize Democrats' advantage. The result was that in 1992: 1)
26 of 27 incumbents were re-elected; 2) the three open seats went
to Democratic state legislators;  3) the eight Republican
incumbents were put in districts where Bill Clinton received an
average of only 23% of the vote in 1992; 4) only one of thirty
races was closer than 10%; and 5) the Democrats won 70% of
seats with less than a majority of the statewide vote. 

         Justice Stevens, joined by Justices Breyer and Ginsburg,
laments that "By minimizing the critical role that political motives
played in the creation of these districts, I fear that the Court may
inadvertently encourage this more objectionable use of power in
the redistricting process." He suggests that political
gerrymandering deserves increased constitutional scrutiny, a
scrutiny which the Court already tentatively accepted in the 1985
Davis v. Bandemer case when the power to gerrymander was
relatively primitive. He writes that "[Legislatures'] responsibility
is not discharged when legislatures permit and even encourage
incumbents to use their positions as public servants to protect
themselves and their parties rather than the interests of their
constituents... If any lines in Texas are worth straightening, it is
those that were twisted to exclude."

         We will soon see dramatic evidence of the need to rein in
political gerrymandering in Texas. With Governor George Bush
able to protect the previously defenseless Republicans, you can be
sure that both parties are working furiously to find the best
districts for their party and their incumbents. Because Texas will
be sued no matter what it does -- either for having too few
majority minority districts or too many  -- the only certainty is
that the state will spend millions of tax dollars and precious
political energy on a matter that should best be left to the voters.

         There are two obvious solutions to the gerrymandering
problem. The first is to attempt a politically neutral process. Iowa
provides one example: the non-partisan Legislative Service
Bureau proposes up to three plans, one of which the state
legislature must adopt without amendment to prevent the Iowa
Supreme Court from drawing its own plan.

         But even if districts are drawn fairly, the product will be
unfair to many voters. Given that most people are consistent in
their support for one party and that many places tilt heavily
toward one party, most voters inevitably will find themselves in
districts essentially safe for one party. Voting should be about
more than a warm, fuzzy feeling for carrying out your civic duty;
rather, voters should have credible choices and realistic chances
to change or reaffirm their representation. 

         The better solution to gerrymandering is to adopt
proportional voting systems, as used in most established
democracies and in many local elections in the United States.
Proportional systems are ones in which most voters in a multi-
seat district -- a district electing more than one representative --
have a real opportunity to elect a candidate. In a five-seat district,
for example, 20% of like-minded voters will elect one
representative, 51% will elect three.

         Using a proportional system, for example, North Carolina
could replace its twelve single-seat districts with four, three-seat
districts. One such plan drawn would provide ample opportunity
for black voters to elect candidates in three different districts. It
also would provide a more balanced delegation, which swung
from 8-4 Democrat in 1992 to 8-4 Republican in 1994 on the
strength of a mere 8% shift in the statewide vote. As
demonstrated by the use of such a system to elect the Illinois
state legislature, more moderate Republicans and Democrats also
would have a better chance to win and act as bridge-builders
between the increasingly polarized parties in Washington. The
savings in redistricting and litigation expenses also would be
immense. 

         Thirty years ago there would have been no barrier to such
proportional plans. In 1967, however, Congress mandated single-
seat districts to prevent dilution of minority votes in at-large
winner-take-all elections. Now Rep. Cynthia McKinney has
introduced the Voters' Choice Act that would restore states'
power to use multi-seat elections if they adopted one of the
proportional systems already used in U.S. local elections.

         Proportional voting systems would help us build a stronger
democracy. They could help avoid the growing evil of political
gerrymandering that undercut the broader goal of national unity,
constructed on the base of a participatory democracy. They would
be predicated on what voters really think and less on where they
happen to live. This, I firmly believe, is the kind of true political
reform that America needs as we face forward to the challenges
of the 21st century.

         (John B. Anderson is a former Member of Congress from
Illinois and presidential candidate. He is president of the
Washington, D.C.-based Center for Voting and Democracy.)

***************************************************************

(Following is the conclusion to Clarence Page's column in the Chicago
Tribune on Sunday, June 16.)

"Yes, what a mess.

"The best way out of this mess might be to look past the race question and
raise deeper questions about how the entire redistricting system, as it
now stands, undermines democracy. Rep. Cynthia McKinney, a black
Democrat who faces an uphill fight in a Georgia district ordered redrawn 
under court order, has introduced a bill that would allow states to 
experiment with alternatives to today's winner-take-all contests in 
single-member districts.

"For years the Center for Voting and Democracy, chaired by former 
Republican presidential candidate John Anderson, has pushed for such 
alternatives. Cumulative voting, for example, would give each voter the 
same number of votes as the number of seats. Then they could distribute 
those votes any way they see fit, including putting them all on one 
candidate or spreading them around. 

"Such alternatives would assure opportunities for minorities of all types 
and views to be represented without requiring bizarre remaps. 
Unfortunately, legislators have been dragging their heels on such reforms 
because, quite simply, the reforms are too democratic, with a small 'd.' 
Incumbents who gained their offices through the existing system have 
little incentive to change it.

"Maybe we, the voters of all races, need to file one big class-action suit 
against the incumbents to demand a better system. One way or another, we 
need to get past the decoy of race. Until then, as they say in the 
B-movies, it's going to be messy."


***********************************************************************

(Following is the conclusion to Steven Holmes' lead article in the New 
York Times "Week in Review" on Sunday, June 16. Like Clarence Page, 
Holmes received information from the Center on June 14.)

"A few experts in voting rights law say that, rather than our current system
of single-member Congressional districts that choose representatives under a
winner-take-all system, there are other means to insure the political clout of
minorities -- raical, religious, or even ideological ones. Some of these 
mechanisms include the creation of larger, multi-seat Congressional districts
in which each voter has a number of votes that can be distributed among several
candidates, or the use of preference voting, by which voters can rank voters in 
order of preference.

"When Lani Guinier, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School
whose nomination as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights was withdrawn
by President Clinton in 1993, put forward these ideas, she was denounced in
some quarters as an anti-democratic radical. But a year later, another black 
wrote these words: 'In principle, cumulative voting and other non-district-based
methods of effecting proportional representation are simply more efficient and
straightforward mechanisms for acheiving what has already become our tacit 
objective: roughly proportional allocation of political power according to race.'

"The author of those words, in a Supreme Court opinion in a voting rights case, 
was Justice Clarence Thomas.

"Surveying the wreckage of the concept of majority-minority districts in the
wake of last week's Supreme Court ruling and the continued existence of
racially polarized voting, Ms. Guinier said it's time for new thinking in
the area of minority voting rights.

"'On some level these black districts are like the canaries that miners used
to carry to tell them when the air in the mine is dangerous,' she said. "They
are alerting us to a problem with our democracy. The solution, to me, is not
simply special rights for the canary. The canary is signalling a problem
that we should all be listening to, all of us, without regard to whether
we are yellow.'"

***************************************************************

    Excerpts From Justice Stevens' Dissent in "Bush v. Vera"  

         -- Texas Redistricting Case, Issued June 13, 1996

             (Or "Political Gerrymandering Run Amuck")

       Justice Stevens, with whom Justice Ginsburg and Justice Breyer
join, dissenting.

  "I would follow the fair implications of the District Court's findings,
and conclude that Texas' entire map is a political, not a racial,
gerrymander.  See Part IV, infra."

                               * * *

       "The factors motivating Texas' redistricting plan are clearly
revealed in the results of the 1992 elections.  Both before and
immediately after the 1990 census, the Democratic Party was in control
of the Texas Legislature.  Under the new map in 1992, more than two-
thirds of the Districts - including each of the new onee - elected
Democrats, even though Texas voters are arguably more likely to vote
Republican than Democrat. Incumbents of both parties were just as
successful: 26 of the 27 incumbents were reelected, while each of the
three new districts elected a state legislator who had essentially acted as
an incumbent in the districting process, giving "incumbents" a 97 percent
success rate.
       "It was not easy for the State to achieve these results while
simultaneously guaranteeing that each district enclosed the residence of
its incumbent, contained the same number of people, and complied with
other federal and state districting requirements.  Much of Dallas and
Houston, for example, was already represented in Congress by
Democrats, and creating new Democratic districts in each city while
ensuring politically safe seats for sitting Representatives required
significant political gerrymandering.  This task was aided by
technological and informational advances that allowed the State to adjust
lines on the scale of city blocks, thereby guaranteeing twists and turns
that would have been essentially impossible in any earlier redistricting.
   "'[T]he result of the Legislature's efforts,' the District Court
concluded, was 'a crazy-quilt of districts' that bore little resemblance to
'the work of public-spirited representatives.'  Vera v. Richards, 861
F. Supp. 1304, 1309 (SD Tex. 1994); see, e.g., Appendix A=FED."

                               * * *

  "The plurality admits that the appellants 'present a . . .
substantial case for their claim that incumbency protection rivalled
race in determining the district's shape.'  Ante, at 12.  Every
individual who participated in the redistricting process knew that
incumbency protection was a critical factor in producing the bizarre
lines and, as the plurality points out, ante, at 89, even the
District Court recognized that this nearly exclusive focus on the
creation of 'safe' districts for incumbents was intimately related to
the bizarre shape of district lines throughout the State.
  '[I]n Texas in 1991, many incumbent protection boundaries
   sabotaged traditional redistricting principles as they routinely
   divided counties, cities, neighborhoods, and regions.  For the
   sake of maintaining or winning seats in the House of
   Representatives, Congressmen or would-be Congressmen shed
   hostile groups and potential opponents by fencing them out of
   their districts.  The Legislature obligingly carved out districts
   of apparent supporters of incumbents, . . . and then added
   appendages to connect their residences to those districts. The
   final result seems not one in which the people select their
   representatives, but in which the representatives have selected
   the people.'  861 F. Supp., at 1334 (citations and footnotes
   omitted).See also id., at 1335, n. 43.  

                               * * *

   "[[Rather than attach blameworthiness to a decision by the
majority to share political power with the victims of past
discriminatory practices, the Court's real concern should be with
the more significant harms that flow from legislative decisions that
'serve no purpose other than to favor one segment -- whether racial,
ethnic, religious, economic, or political -- that may occupy a
position of strength at a particular point in time, or to disadvantage
a politically weak segment of the community.'  Karcher v.
Daggett, 462 U. S. 725, 748 (1983) (Stevens, J., concurring). 
This case is as good an illustration of such self-serving behavior
on the part of legislators as any - but not with respect to racial
gerrymandering.  The real problem is the politically motivated
gerrymandering that occurred in Texas.  Many of the oddest twists
and turns of the Texas districts would never have been created if
the Legislature had not been so intent on protecting party and
incumbents. See also Shaw II, ante, at 2122 (Stevens, J.,
dissenting) (noting the same influences behind the bizarre shape of
North Carolina's District 12).
  "By minimizing the critical role that political motives played in
the creation of these districts, I fear that the Court may
inadvertently encourage this more objectionable use of power in the
redistricting process.  Legislatures and elected representatives have
a responsibility to behave in a way that incorporates the 'elements
of legitimacy and neutrality that must always characterize the
performance of the sovereign's duty to govern impartially.'
Cleburne, 473 U. S., at 452.  That responsibility is not discharged
when legislatures permit and even encourage incumbents to use
their positions as public servants to protect themselves and their
parties rather than the interests of their constituents.  See Karcher
v. Daggett, 462 U. S., at 748, 754 (Stevens, J., concurring). If
any lines in Texas are worth straightening, it is those that were
twisted to exclude, not those altered to include.