December news: Redistricting and voter rip-offs

December news on electoral reform in the Midwest
Compiled by Dan Johnson-Weinberger

The Midwest Democracy Center is a non-profit, membership advocacy 
group that works to make our governments more democratic and 
representative. To get off this list, please reply to this email with 
a small note.

Our main goal is to revive cumulative voting for the Illinois House 
of Representatives (used from 1870 ? 1980) so that political 
minorities will have some representation. Electing three people from 
one big district instead of three people each elected from their own 
smaller district ensures that all voters have someone who represents 
their views, wherever they happen to live, and lessens the number of 
no-choice elections.

Our other goal is to use instant runoff voting for single-winner 
elections (like governor) to end spoiler candidacies and ensure the 
majority gets to pick the winner. 

Our website is www.midwestdemocracy.org and our telephone number is 
312.587.7060. We encourage your participation and membership (join 
online)! 

GENERAL ASSEMBLY COMING BACK IN SESSION

Our chance to move our legislative agenda forward is coming. The 
Illinois General Assembly will be in session from late January to 
early May. This is the time to move our bills forward. We're aiming 
for hearing in late January / early February in Springfield. 

This is a good time to contact your state representative and state 
senator (go to www.vote-smart.org if you don't know who they are) and 
tell them that you support the drive to revive cumulative voting, as 
well as instant runoff voting. One letter can make a difference.

As soon as we can firm up dates and places for hearings to get a 
votes on HJRCA 4 in the House and SJR 43in the Senate (both would put 
cumulative voting in three-member districts on the November 2002 
ballot), we'll send out that information.

REDISTRICTING DONE IN ILLINOIS: VOTERS RIPPED OFF

The incumbents have drawn their maps. Most elections are going to be 
even more boring than they were in the 1990s as the districts have 
been made `safer' for one party. The new map for the 19 Members of 
Congress is an incumbent protection plan. I predict that no Illinois 
Member of Congress will ever get less than 55% of the vote in a 
November election from 2002 through 2012. The state legislative maps 
are also done, and there is almost no competition slated for 
November, as there are so few districts where members of both parties 
have filed to run in the primary election. The Chicago City Council 
redraw the boundaries for those 50 wards, and the only incumbent who 
might have faced a difficult challenge to get re-elected was already 
running for the state senate!

To see the new maps, check out www.ilredistricting.org (Mike 
Madigan's site, which is pretty good).

To see just how few people will be on the ballot in 2002 because the 
districts are so gerrymandered, go to 
http://www.elections.state.il.us/ElecInfo/pages/CandFiling.asp (the 
State Board of Elections website, which is also pretty good).

We'll probably produce a report in January detailing the appalling 
lack of competition in the new maps. Look for it on our website.

At the end of this newsletter is a Wall Street Journal editorial 
describing the "Cheating Seating" of gerrymandering and a reply to 
the editorial (which will hopefully be published in the Journal, but 
if not, at least you get to read it).

INSTANT RUNOFF VOTING IN SAN FRANCISCO CAMPAIGN

Do you know anyone in the Bay Area? Forward this email to them!

San Francisco voters will have the chance to implement instant runoff 
voting at the March 5th election. Called Proposition A, the 
referendum would use instant runoff voting instead of a November 
election and December runoff election, saving taxpayers $2 million 
every year. 

In an IRV election, voters pick their favorite candidate and their 
runoff candidate, just in case their favorite candidate gets 
eliminated. If no one gets 50% of the first-choice votes, an instant 
runoff is held. The candidate who came in last is eliminated, and the 
supporters of the loser have their votes count toward their runoff 
choice on the ballot ? just like a regular runoff election. This 
innovative system saves money, makes sure the winner of an election 
has the broadest amount of support and eliminated the `spoiler' 
problem of wasted votes.

Any city that uses separate runoff elections should use instant 
runoff voting instead.

Check out www.improvetherunoff.org for details on the San Francisco 
campaign.

And if you are interested in spending a day or a week in San 
Francisco working on the campaign, we need your help! Campaign 
interns are traveling to San Francisco and the campaign is setting up 
host housing. If you'd like to participate, email Dan Johnson-
Weinberger at djw@fairvote.org with the dates or your potential 
availability between now and March 5th.

SANTA DIDN'T COME TO THE MIDWEST DEMOCRACY CENTER

But you can make things right. 

We still have a little wish list. If you can play Santa to the 
Midwest Democracy Center, we'd be much obliged.

We could use the following items:

Stamps. Lots of them.
A wooden bookshelf
A computer desk
A group of people to speak to about electoral reform
Email addresses of people who would like to get this monthly 
newsletter
Your participation

Contact the Center at 312.587.7060 or via email at mdc@prairienet.org 
if you can help with anything.

FINALLY, THE JOURNAL EDITORIAL AND OUR REACTION

So that we aren't accused of being a left-wing organization, here is 
the trenchant editorial from the very right-wing Wall Street Journal. 
Enjoy it, and the reaction that follows.

"Cheating Seating"
December 27, 2001, Wall Street Journal Editorial

When last we wrote about the "bipartisan scandal" known as 
gerrymandering, we zeroed in on the way it takes the competition out 
of Congressional elections. But it turns out things are worse than we 
thought: Gerrymandering is even affecting votes in Congress. Witness 
the ideological pirouette now being performed by California 
Representative Ellen Tauscher.

Ms. Tauscher is a three-term Democrat from the suburbs of San 
Francisco who won her seat as a moderate free-trader. She became vice 
chair of the Democratic Leadership Council, chiding her own party's 
protectionists and voting for several trade accords. Business groups 
threw their support and cash behind her re-election, along with 
other "New Democrats."

So they (and we) were shocked to discover that in the critical vote 
to grant President Bush trade promotion authority -- which passed by 
a single vote -- Ms. Tauscher cast her lot with the "nays." At first 
we suspected pressure from Big Labor, but that proved to be only half 
right. The bigger cause of her 180-degree ideological shift turns out 
to be California's once-a-decade gerrymander. Like every other 
Congressperson in our most populous state, Ms. Tauscher has suddenly 
been granted a "safe" seat. Provided she plays by the new rules, that 
is.

Ms. Tauscher's new safe seat is part of a redistricting plan which 
Democrats saw as a way of protecting their 32 to 20 advantage in the 
state's Congressional delegation. The deal they struck protected 
incumbents of both parties, pushing Democratic voters into districts 
with Democratic representatives and Republican voters into districts 
with Republican representatives. Only a handful of these seats had 
ever been competitive, and Ms. Tauscher's was one of them.

But now essentially none of them will be. The head of the GOP 
Congressional campaign committee, Tom Davis, has already suggested 
he'll invest no money in any California races in 2002. Given 
California's size, that means that one-eighth of the entire U.S. 
House of Representatives will face no real competition from the other 
party.

As Ms. Tauscher's trade vote shows, all of this has real-world 
political consequences. Though Ms. Tauscher no longer need worry 
about losing to a Republican, what she does have to worry about now 
is the Democratic primary, where the new challenge will come from a 
labor-left far less amenable to her pro-trade views.

Her local paper, the Contra Costa Times, calls this "punitive 
redistricting." And Ms. Tauscher herself blasted the redistricting 
plan as retribution for her pro-business views and her failure to 
endorse San Francisco liberal Nancy Pelosi for minority House whip. 
Liberal line-drawers stretched what had been a compact district all 
the way to Sacramento County, replacing her swing suburbanites with 
union members and liberals.

For Ms. Tauscher that means that the safest political play now is to 
repudiate her former principles and become a protectionist. Which is 
exactly what she's now done.

The California gerrymander also affects Gary Condit, whose relatively 
moderate district (53% of whom voted for George W. Bush) has just 
been stuffed with more Democrats. This includes a significant boost 
in Hispanics who might be more likely to vote for primary challenger 
Dennis Cardoza, a state assemblyman, and an influx of more Democrats 
from Stockton expected to favor a more liberal challenger.

Now, we don't mind a good ideological fight. But gerrymanders mean 
that such fights actually matter less in the public arena because 
they have less chance to change any votes or seats. Members in "safe" 
seats seldom change their minds, and only the rare national tidal 
wave can make more than a handful of gerrymandered seats competitive.

It tells us much about the state of play in Washington that despite 
its corrupting influence on our politics, gerrymandering never 
attracts the passion that, say, attaches itself to campaign-
finance "reform" ? which would only help make incumbents safer in 
their seats. But maybe that's the point. As the Tauscher turnabout 
shows, gerrymanders mean that the voters no longer choose their 
politicians; the politicians choose their voters.

REACTION TO WALL STREET JOURNAL

Kudos for exposing the ultimate inside baseball game of power 
politics: gerrymandering. Virtually alone among the nation's 
editorial pages, the Journal has identified this all too-effective 
tool wielded behind the scenes to shape policy for a decade.

Your editorials have been short on remedies, however. One possible 
solution is to force or convince mapmakers to draw competitive 
districts (currently about 35 of the nation's 435 districts are 
potentially winnable by either of the major parties, the other 400+ 
are one-party fiefdoms). This would be an improvement: gerrymandering 
for a noble purpose, you might call it. Very little can influence 
incumbents drawing their own maps, however, and the 2001 trend has 
been to draw more safe seats rather than more competitive districts. 

Allow me to finger the fundamental culprit behind gerrymandering's 
worst excesses: the single-member district. After all, when only one 
Member of Congress is elected from a district, the political minority 
(Manhattan Republicans, Alaskan Democrats) doesn't pick the winner. 
The majority does that. Thus, gerrymandering is the game of deciding 
who will be stuck as the voiceless political minority in a district 
that elects a sole representative.

It wasn't always such. Only a 1967 federal statute mandates the use 
of single-member districts; the Constitution allows each State to 
choose how to elect their congressional delegation. The Founding 
generation was familiar with at-large elections where several Members 
were elected statewide on the `general ticket.' No gerrymandering 
there. 

Even better, we might follow the Irish model of districts that elect 
three to five Members and allow proportional voting, so the political 
minority can elect one of the bunch. Closer to home, my own state of 
Illinois used three-member districts and cumulative voting to elect 
the state House for more than a century. Both of these two-party 
systems minimize the manipulation of the map by electing members of 
both parties from each district. 

I hope the Journal continues to spotlight the worst excesses of this 
round of redistricting (more than 40% of the nation's legislative 
seats have yet to be redrawn) with an eye towards reforms that would 
strip mapmakers of their power to trump voters.

THANKS FOR READING AND HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Midwest Democracy Center
325 West Huron #304
Chicago, Illinois 60610
www.midwestdemocracy.org
312.587.7060