Phillies in Five!!!

or, Why Redistricting Matters

The Philadelphia Phillies are facing elimination tonight in game 6 of the World Series. One week ago, their ace pitcher led the team to a clear 6-1 rout of the Yankees, but New York came back to win the next three by scores of 3-1, 8-5, and 7-4. Philadelphia won the fifth game 8-6, but they have to win both remaining games to take the Series.

If the Phillies had scored the same number of runs in different games, the Series would be very different. If the Phillies, for instance, could move 3 runs from game 1 to game 2, they'd still have won the first game, 3-1, but they also would have won the second game 4-3. In which case, it'd be the Yankees facing elimination. And indeed, if you drained the Phillies' excess runs from games 1 and 5 and moved them to games two and three, while also moving a few Yankee runs from those games into game 4, one could have engineered a Philadelphia Championship last Monday night.

Of course, the Yankees could plot similar changes. They've outscored the Phillies, and could re-jigger their runs into a five-game Championship (they'd still need five games anyway you slice it, but moving one run each from games 2, 3, and 4 into game 5 would have ended the Series).

Now, the purists will insist that's not how the game of baseball is played. Runs count only in the game in which they are scored. But that's exactly how the game of redistricting works. Voters can be moved from one district to another.

Suppose you're a public official who squeaks by each election, while a friendly official in a neighboring district coasts to victory time and time again. Couldn't you take a few of their voters, who'd be only too happy to vote for you, and ditch some of the malcontents who don't appreciate your candidacies? If you're always drawing 52%-55% of the vote to your neighbor's 72-75%, just by trading a few precincts, you could both get a comfortable 60% without too much trouble. You get to spend more time with your family at election time (without leaving office!) and the voters? They get you to represent them. What's not to like?

A lot, actually, Redistricting is never a benign process. Redistricting can inflate a political majority, deny representation to minorities, and insulate officials from the normal checks on power that elections are supposed to bring. Especially when redistricting is dominated by one political party, as it has been in Illinois for the last three maps, the process can hand an enormous electoral advantage to the side that draws the lines.

Redistricting is a necessary part of governing. Districts should be roughly equal in population, so as people move around, districts should be redrawn. They should also be crafted so that the governing body, as a whole, most accurately reflects the voters, as a whole. But how you draw the lines, how you slice the dirt, can determine who votes for which officials, who can run against which officials, and ultimately who gets to be an official. It's not surprise that officials take a keen interest in redistricting.

Most voters don't seem to follow the process. But it's not too late. Maps get drawn in 2011, after the 2010 census. If you want to learn more about how the process works, the redistricting game, which was put together by the Annenberg Center at the University of Southern California, is a great place to start.

Picking the Pickers: Redistricting Update

Experts who testified at a Senate Redistricting Committee meeting this week didn’t paint a pretty picture about Illinois’ current redistricting process.

In fact, they described the process that produces new legislative district maps every 10 years as downright awful.

In Illinois, the redistricting process is dominated by lawmakers: The state Constitution gives the entire General Assembly the first crack at drawing the boundaries for state legislative districts. But if lawmakers can’t reach an agreement, the Republican and Democratic leaders in each chamber get to appoint one citizen and one lawmaker, each, to a special eight-member Legislative Redistricting Commission. If that panel can’t agree on a map, either, the redistricting process gets thrown into the hands of one randomly chosen ninth member of the commission.

During each redistricting process over the last three decades, lawmakers have butted heads over the map – ultimately going to the “tiebreaker round,” and throwing the process into the hands of one party.

As the Daily Herald editorial board notes today, experts have acknowledged allowing one party to control the state’s map is a bad way to operate. Redistricting greatly impacts future elections because it determines which residents can vote for which representatives. Left in the hands of one party, redistricting can – and has – produced districts that greatly favor candidates of that party.

Now, in advance of the 2011 redistricting process that will follow next year’s Census, the Illinois Senate is hosting once-a-month committee hearings around the state about redistricting.

Former State Senator and Comptroller Dawn Clark Netsch, drawing from her experience as a delegate to the 1970 Constitutional Convention that produced the current redistricting process, explained that the tiebreaker option was supposed to be, in essence, the “nuclear option.” The thought of winner-take-all was supposed to encourage political parties to work together, for fear that they would lose the tiebreaker. There was also some hope among the delegates that the ninth member would be a "negotiator" or moderating influence, not someone who would side with one party against the other.

But, that wasn’t the case in 1981, nor 1991, nor 2001. And there’s no reason to think 2011 will be any different – unless the system is changed.

Roosevelt University Political Science Professor Paul Green said that the tiebreaker provision has made redistricting a partisan answer to a question that is not supposed to be partisan.

Atlhough Green and Netsch were asked to testify about the history of redistricting in Illinois, both said that the system must be changed to allow people who aren’t lawmakers or partisan agents to have a role in the process.

Green also noted what amounts to the elephant in the redistricting committee room: Although many members of the General Assembly have voiced concerns about the current redistricting process, few – if any – are willing to be “political martyrs,” and sacrifice their own chance to be re-elected for the sake of reform.

That’s part of what makes redistricting reform in Illinois so challenging. Lawmakers historically have demonstrated reluctance to change the status quo. Even though – as Green aptly pointed out – that redistricting is largely to blame for Illinois’ woefully noncompetitive state legislative elections.

Illinois needs a better redistricting system. We need a system that ensures the districts that are created just two years from now foster active political discussion and elect lawmakers that are responsive to their voters. We need a system that ensures that the 177 members of the General Assembly look as much like the other 13 million residents of Illinois as possible.

Several plans to ameliorate the current system have already been drafted – including proposals from several lawmakers, the Illinois Reform Commission, and the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute.

We hope the Illinois General Assembly gives these plans serious consideration, and creates a new process that is transparent and reflects the desires of the public. ICPR supports the principles recently adopted by Americans for Redistricting Reform.

The Senate Redistricting Committee is scheduled to next meet on Aug. 18 in Springfield. An audio recording of the hearings will be made available through the General Assembly's website.

De-rigging Redistricting

The Illinois Constitution requires the state to redraw its state legislative and Congressional district boundaries every 10 years, following the national census. This process, known as redistricting, greatly impacts future elections because it determines which voters will pick which representatives.

Ideally, districts will be drawn to maximize competitiveness, foster active political discussion and reflect the uniqueness of communities.

But practice hasn't live up to the ideal. Indeed, many have described redistricting as the process by which elected officials choose their constituents. In the hands of a skilled mapmaker, for example, districts can be drawn to favor one political party, thus allowing them to maintain control of the district and its representation in upcoming elections. Districts also can be drawn to protect incumbents from likely challengers, or crafted so that two incumbents are put in the same district and forced to either drop out or run against each other.

The redistricting process outlined by the Illinois Constitution calls for the General Assembly to draw the state's legislative district boundaries. If legislators fail to reach agreement, then a Legislative Redistricting Commission is convened, with 8 members dived evenly between Republicans and Democrats. If that, too, fails, a "tiebreaker" of sorts goes into effect -- and one new member of the Commission, either a Republican or a Democrat, is chosen at random and gets the final say on what Illinois' districts will be for the next 10 years.

In each of the last three remaps, not only has the legislative process failed, but the 8-member Commission also failed, so the tie-breaker delivered control of the process into one party's hands. In each instance, the party that won the tiebreaker created districts which greatly favored their party's candidates, giving them an incalculable advantage in elections for the Illinois House and Senate for the ensuing decade.

There has been broad acknowledgement that Illinois' redistricting process leaves much to be desired. While it seems all would agree that Illinois needs a system which ensures all residents receive fair and equal representation, there is not a consensus on how to redesign the current system or even over whether changes need to be focused on the Constitution or on practices within the legislature. Many, particularly Democrats, are hopeful that the legislature will write a map in 2011 without convening a Commission, despite the odds.

The Illinois Senate has formed a Redistricting Committee, which is scheduled to hold four meetings this summer to hear testimony on redistricting. The first meeting is tentatively scheduled for 11 a.m. Wednesday, July 22, at the Thompson Center, 16th floor, in Chicago. Dawn Clark Netsch, Northwestern University law professor and ICPR board member, and Paul Green of Roosevelt University are among those scheduled to testify.

If you're in the Chicago area, we encourage you to attend. Future meetings of the Committee are planned for Peoria (August 19), Carbondale (September 16), and Springfield (October 14); for updates and to confirm times and locations, go here.

Congratulations, Rep. Mike Fortner

The Ohio Redistricting Competition announced the winners of their contest to develop a new method of drawing district boundaries, and Illinois State Rep. Mike Fortner is one of three winners.

The Competition, sponsored by the Ohio Secretary of State's office and several civic organizations, sought new processes for creating fair legislative boundaries, aimed to satisfy these criteria: Compactness, Communities of Interest, Competitiveness., and Representational Fairness.

Click here for more details.