Redistricting: Yes on Prop. 20, no on Prop. 27
Abraham Lincoln famously portrayed this nation's founding aspiration best: America shall be ruled by a "government of the people, by the people, for the people." Among other implications, that means elected officials should be directly accountable to the voters.
But politicians in both parties have found a convenient way to shield their seats from challengers by way of gerrymandering, the practice of deliberately modifying district boundaries to lock in friendly blocs of votes. Politicians periodically adjust the lines, based on census-derived demographics, to include the largest possible portion of sympathetic voters and exclude those less likely to offer support at the polls. So powerful is this institutionalized cherry-picking, an individual politician can fall miserably from grace and still expect his party to hold on to his district.
This is a problem for a number of reasons. Here are two. First, locked-in districts encourage elected officials to cater to the extremes of their own party. This tends to drown out moderate voices and leads to stalemate in the halls of the Legislature. Second, elected officials sometimes carve up dissenting constituencies and distribute them into different districts so that those groups cannot hold meaningful voting blocs in any one district. This disenfranchises groups of like-minded voters.
We have already spoken on this issue. Proposition 11, approved by California voters just two years ago, transferred from politicians the power to define state legislative and tax districts, and authorized the creation of the Citizens Redistricting Commission, a substantially nonpartisan body that will draw up boundaries in a manner that looks at logic and not political expediency.
In a stunning act of audacity, the losers in Prop. 11's victory -- the state's major political parties -- have come back and asked for a do-over. Would we like to change our minds?
Our answer: No, emphatically. But to make sure they understand this time, we'll need to vote no on Prop. 27.
Voters will also have a chance to extend Prop. 11's reach by supporting Prop. 20, which will expand the commission's authority to outline congressional districts. Prop. 20 makes sense for all the same reasons Prop. 11 did: It will restore power to the voters by shifting district-drawing authority from the parties to the independent, politically balanced body. Unlike the behind-the-scenes scheming of the current system, all of the commission's work -- right down to the selection of its members -- is publicly accessible, transparent and open to scrutiny.
This will enhance our democracy by breaking the parties' monopolies on power, as voters will choose their representatives instead of the other way around. Who's in charge here, anyway?
Not only does Prop. 20 more closely align policy with the intent of the Founding Fathers, it goes to the heart of free-market philosophy by insisting on competition. After all, lawmakers have less incentive to actually represent the little people if there's no threat from the electorate.
Bottom line: Fair districting means better government. That's why it's important for voters to support Prop. 20 and reject Prop. 27.
