California does redistricting

Yesterday evening I attended an event put on by Voters Not Politicians, the campaign, for which I’m a presenter, trying to end gerrymandering in Michigan. This event had three people from the Citizen Redistricting Commission in California. That state did in 2008 what we are attempting to do now. These commission members told about what it was like to be a part of the first such commission in their state.

The event was held in the Troy Community Center. Troy is a suburb north of Detroit, so a bit of a commute for me (and in rush hour traffic). Their Community Center is a nice building with sports facilities (including an indoor family pool), and banquet and meeting rooms. We were in one of the meeting rooms.

Actually, we overwhelmed the meeting room. There were chairs for 120 and I think there were 180 of us there. The center wouldn’t bring in more chairs, saying we were beyond the room’s stated capacity. But they didn’t have a larger room available. So many of us, including me, stood through the program. Yes, a lot of interest in our campaign, even if the invitation went mostly to campaign volunteers.

The California redistricting commissioners serve a 10 year term, though nearly all of the activity is in the first year as they draw the maps and defend them in court. At this point they are visiting other states to explain what they did in hopes they (like us) will do the same.

In California 32,000 people applied to be on the commission. A state agency (deemed the most impartial) went through the stack and pulled out those that were capable of serving. I think that left about 60 people. The first eight members were chosen by lottery. They then chose another six that would balance the membership by region of the state, ethnicity, and perhaps a few other things. The law required there be 5 GOP, 5 Dem, and 4 independent members, with approval requiring 3 votes from each group.

They began meeting in January 2011. The first big issue was money. They were given $3 million, which they quickly figured out wasn’t enough. They’d have to be frugal. They couldn’t ask for more because everyone in the legislature didn’t want them to exist. In addition, they had to rent an office, hire staff, figure out how to function as a state agency that no state official wanted to help, decide how the group was to function, get trained in ethics, and figure out how to work with the state open meeting laws (every meeting was livestreamed and no discussions outside of meetings). They agreed to a rotating chair, and once they began having daily meetings the chair switched once a week.

So, three months to get set up. Then two months of meetings for public input. Then two more months of map drawing. Then two weeks of public comments on the completed maps, a final certification vote, then handing it all off to the Attorney General. During this time being a commissioner was a full time job.

In those two months of public meetings they listened to 2,700 people. Most of these public meetings were in places that weren’t big enough (that frugal budget thing). The average meeting length was three hours, some went as long as five. They also received 20,000 public comments, mostly emails. All of it was posted online.

Most people talked about communities of interest – we have this common thing so want to be in the same district. A community of interest was whatever the people said was important to them. This was usually such things as a school district or farmers around a common water source. One speaker told about meetings in Napa Valley. In one, grape growers wanted to be in the same district. In the next, premium grape growers said if you need to divide us, draw the line between us and the ordinary grape growers.

Communities of interest could conflict, especially around Los Angeles. It wasn’t possible to put each ethnic group into its own district. Which group got split? They decided to favor the group that would get the most benefit at a particular level of government – if grouping one way boosted the chances of a federal program then that guided how the Congressional map was drawn. Sometimes the affected groups met ahead of time and worked out a unity map showing their compromises.

It was pretty obvious that groups were trying to game the system. The big clue would be a series of speakers (or a series of emails) with exactly the same wording. Another would be one speaker ratting on another: “That previous speaker isn’t a ‘concerned citizen,’ he’s a staffer for this official.”

Even with a meager budget they hired a map company. They had to weed out those that had worked to gerrymander previous maps. The map company employees were there during meetings running the map programs under the direction of the commission members. The area under discussion displayed on a big screen (and online). Members would say what would happen if a certain line was moved two miles to the west? The map people made the change and the computer would recalculate the various statistics, such as population and ethnic makeup. The programs intentionally did not contain political party affiliation.

Various public-minded foundations helped with money, including a campaign to get more ethnic people to apply to be commissioners.

People who study district maps have declared California to be the most competitive. The new maps brought in fresh minds to the state government.

The commission is a part of the state constitution (as we are proposing in Michigan). Even so, once the new legislature was seated the commission asked for some supporting laws. These included raising the budget to $10 million and revising the timeline so the commission starts in August rather in January, giving them a year instead of less than eight months. The commission also wrote a handbook for their successors. None of the current members will be on the next commission, though they will be able to consult.