‘Rigged’ electoral process a reason for voters to be angry
In a new TV ad, Donald Trump claims the system stays “rigged” against Americans.
He’s right. But not for the reasons the Republican presidential nominee cites. It’s not about a border wall or asylum for Syrian refugees.
The real rigging in this country is less sexy and, thus, less understood.
It’s the game politicians play with the electoral process. From needless, discriminatory voter ID laws to high-tech partisan gerrymandering, we have a political system that lets the politicians pick voters, rather than the other way around.
That’s not democracy. And that’s what we should be mad about.
But where was the outrage when Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced last week he’d appeal a finding by the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that Texas’ voter ID law, the most restrictive in the country, discriminates against minorities? Paxton’s office said the case, which has cost the state millions, is about protecting “the integrity of vot- ing” in Texas.
The proof that integrity is under threat? Not a shred. An author of a book on voting rights history recently wrote in the Washington Post that deaths by lightning are more common than voter fraud.
But voter ID laws are only part of the problem. The shadowy, complicated process of redistricting is an even greater threat to democracy.
In all but a few states, partisan members of legislatures are in charge of drawing districts that control their political fates and those of Congress members. They do this largely through diluting voting power of the opposing party by shoving it into as few districts as possible.
I just finished a book on the subject so profanely titled that I can’t print the whole thing. It appears on the cover as “Ratf**ked.” At first, I found the name gratuitous. By the end, it seemed apt. And maybe the only
way to get people to read 245 pages about election maps.
The subtitle, for what it’s worth: “The True Story Behind The Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy.”
Author David Daley documents what he concludes is an unprecedented effort by Chris Jankowski and other Republican strategists to flip legislatures in battleground states after President Barack Obama’s election, and then use the advantage to control the post-census process of redrawing political maps.
There’s nothing new about gerrymandering. And, of course, Democrats gerrymandered for decades, but they mostly used it as an “incumbency protection racket,” Daley writes, citing former longtime Texas Democratic Congressman Martin Frost, not as a “tool to gain a majority they wouldn’t otherwise obtain.” Foregone conclusions
This brave new approach to redistricting, Daley writes, is highly secretive and aided by technology that makes the mapmaker all-knowing, using not only demographic data from the census, but marketers’ databases fed by such things as social media posts, online purchases and magazine subscriptions. Suddenly, Daley says, rewiring our democracy was “as simple as outbidding a rival on eBay.”
The results have been as aesthetically interesting as they are mathematically precise. Take North Carolina’s long, narrow 12th District which, Daley writes, hugs Interstate 85 so closely in some parts that northbound lanes are in one district and southbound in another.
North Carolina has become a poster child in the election-rigging movement. Last week, federal judges struck down nearly 30 House and Senate districts as illegal racial gerrymanders. And consider this: In 2012, for the first time in 40 years, the party that received the most votes in congressional races — in that case, the Democrats — failed to take control of the House. In Pennsylvania, where more voters cast ballots for Democratic candidates than Republican, the delegation went 13-5 for the GOP.
When races become foregone conclusions, voter interest wanes, and so does representatives’ motivation to reach across the aisle and seek compromise.
All that said, Republicans shouldn’t be demonized for their successful hack of the American political process. If Democrats had thought of it first, they surely would have done it. Direct democracy So what’s the solution? In some states, where people enjoy forms of direct democracy — such as popular referendums — citizens have backed nonpartisan commissions to draw political boundaries. That system isn’t perfect, or impervious to political influence. But it’s progress.
In California, where powerful Democrats spent millions trying to defeat such a measure, it passed with more than 61 percent. Daley points out the immediate results in 2010: In the previous eight years, spanning 500 elections, only one incumbent was defeated. But the new districts, drawn by the independent commission, produced a delegation in which more than a quarter of the members were new.
Texans can only dream of such reforms.
As independent-minded as we pride ourselves on being, we have no form of direct democracy in the Lone Star State. The only route to shifting control over redistricting from politicians to citizens would be a two-thirds vote in both the Texas House and Senate, and then a vote of the people to ratify the proposed constitutional amendment, said Rice political science professor Mark Jones.
Most every session in Austin, some quixotic lawmaker files a redistricting reform bill. Former Republican Sen. Jeff Wentworth of San Antonio got one out of committee in 2011, but that’s the best anyone has done.
Jones says the most likely chance for reform in Texas would come if Republicans start to seriously fear losing their majority, while at the same time Democrats remain skeptical of their prospects to turn the state blue.
In other words, our elected representatives will only choose fairness if they lose faith in cheating.
Until then, the process isn’t ours. It’s theirs. It’s rigged, and I hope that makes you mad. Mad enough to care.