Monday, October 17, 2005

Proposition 77: Bad, Bad, Bad

Like a lot of people, I had mixed feelings about Proposition 77, Schwarzenegger's initiative to take redistricting authority away from the legislature. There are very few competitive districts in California, Democratic or Republican--a situation that obviously doesn't serve the voters very well--and genuine reform would be welcome. The Poorman argues that giving up the possibility of pulling our own DeLay in California, and gerrymandering ourselves into a few more Democratic representatives, would amount to unilateral disarmament. This argument has merit, but I think it's a weak one. Still, the initiative does come from Schwarzenegger, so my default choice is to vote against it.

Via Kevin Drum, Brad Plumer has the definitive analysis, and it turns out that Prop 77 is a lot worse than I thought.

The devil is in the details, in this case the guidelines for districts:

District boundaries shall conform to the geographic boundaries of a county, city, or city and county to the greatest extent practicable. In this regard, a redistricting plan shall comply with these criteria in the following order of importance: (1) crate the most whole counties possible, (2) create the fewest county fragments possible, (3) create the most whole cities possible, and (4) create the fewest city fragmetns possible, except as necessary to comply with the requirements of the preceding subdivisions of this section.

And:
Every district shall be as compact as possible except to the extent necessary to comply with the requirements of the preceding subdivisions of this section. With regard to compactness, to the extent practicable a contiguous area of population shall not be bypassed to incorporate an area of population more distant.

To understand how bad this is, you have to keep in mind that the old North-South split is a thing of the past, and that the real split in California is between East and West--or more precisely, between a few highly concentrated urban areas and a whole lot of rural and exurban land, with the suburbs in the middle. Brad Plumer argues that under those circumstances, a scheme that aims for compact districts will inherently shortchange Democrats by packing them into the fewest possible urban districts--which, of course, won't do anything to make districts more competitive. Not incidentally, this would also tend to shortchange minority voters (notwithstanding that last clause, which refers back to a requirement that districts conform to the Voting Rights Act). On that basis, expect a legal challenge to the first redistricting scheme to be put in place under Prop 77--but of course such a lawsuit would likely go to the Supreme Court, and we know how Roberts and whoever replaces Miers will vote on that one.

Read the whole thing, and then vote no on 77.