There are fair ways to redraw districts
Technology easily could solve the election issue, but in Texas, that defeats the purpose.
As Major League Baseball enters the home stretch, its potentates are keenly observing an experiment conducted in several minor leagues this season that represents the most radical change in the national pastime since Abner Doubleday allegedly invented the game. To call balls and strikes, the lower-level leagues have been relying on robo-umpires.
The robo-umpire is actually a computer situated in the press box that makes the call after each pitch and instantaneously relays its judgment to an ear-pieceequipped human ump still crouched behind the catcher. Since the robo-umpire is mute, the human ump still gives voice, growling “Stee-rike!” or “Ball” for players and fans.
The consensus seems to be that the robo-umps have had a good year. And that gave us an idea.
On Sept. 20, the Texas commissioner of political baseball, Gov. Greg Abbott, will summon lawmakers back to Austin for the third time this summer. Their constitutionally mandated task will be to set the metes and bounds of the political game for the next decade. They’ll be redistricting, in other words, drawing lines for the Texas House, the state Senate, Congress and the state Board of Education.
No one expects lawmakers to improve the game; everyone, even the map drawers, expects them to cheat the voting populace out of fair and equitable representation in order to perpetuate their hold on power. That’s the way the game is played, regardless of the party in control.
In Texas, Republicans have enjoyed almost total dominance for so long, they’ve been the happy beneficiaries of redistricting technology developed only in the past decade or so that allows mapmakers to concoct voting districts with nearly house-to-house precision. Democratic lawmakers, wandering in the political outfield for more than a quarter-century, can only fantasize about the ease of gerrymandering in the modern era with tools that make the process of choosing one’s own voters as simple as rubbing up a baseball with Vaseline.
In theory, a robo-umpire drawing lines in the redistricting process could be used for good, for the benefit of citizens, and not for the subversive enterprise of protecting incumbents through the partisan artistry of gerrymandering.
Technology could easily draw competitive districts that would naturally force debates within districts, nurture political persuasion and discourage dangerously dysfunctional political extremes. Computers programmed to the public good could make gerrymanders an extinct species.
That’s not what will happen this fall, of course. As Karl Rove, the legendary Texas political guru, likes to point out, when you draw the lines, you make the rules. In Texas, that means that Republican incumbents in far too many districts have nothing to fear except some wild-eyed primary challenger from the far right. Vanquish the wild-eyed in the first-round election, and their district makeup guarantees victory in November.
Obviously, Texas Republicans are not going to voluntarily relinquish their redistricting power to a non-partisan roboumpire.. They won’t even seriously consider a fair alternative floated several years ago by a respected Republican lawmaker from San Antonio.
Jeff Wentworth, a state representative from 1988 to 1993 and a state senator from 1993 to 2012, proposed establishing an independent commission to draw district lines. The eight commissioners would be chosen by the Legislature and could not include lobbyists or lawmakers.
Wentworth’s colleagues, Republican and Democratic, considered his idea a harmless idiosyncrasy; it went nowhere. In 2012, the veteran lawmaker lost the Republican primary to New Braunfels physician and tea party champion Donna Campbell, 66 percent to 34 percent. Campbell still holds the office.
Wentworth was simply a man ahead of his time. These days seven states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Michigan, Montana, and Washington — rely on independent commissions for congressional redistricting, according to a recent Washington Post analysis. Many other states have hybrid systems.
Commissions seek to draw geographically compact districts built around communities of interest — communities bound by social, economic and historic characteristics. They protect minority voting rights. Because commission-drawn districts tend to be competitive, they encourage voter participation.
Redistricting commissions aren’t perfect. In an inherently political process, allegedly nonpartisan commissioners can get just as balled up as a nest of snakes, and yet not one of the states that rely solely on commissions has chosen to return the duty to lawmakers. The results, for the most part, have been fair and equitable.
Texas Republicans are well aware that the state’s changing demographics — more minorities, more urbanites, more collegeeducated voters — portend a blue future. They’ll use every redistricting tool at hand to cement in minority governance for the next decade and beyond.
As an increasingly extreme GOP begins drawing lines — and restricting voter participation — Democrats, independents and good-government Republicans have only a stubby pencil with no eraser for fighting back. They can turn to the courts, as state Sen. Sarah Eckhardt, D-Austin, and state Sen. Roland Gutierrez, D-San Antonio, already have done. They filed a federal lawsuit last week arguing that the Texas Constitution requires lawmakers to redistrict in a regular session, which won’t happen until 2023. The two Democrats want the courts to draw the maps.
Although the lawsuit is a long shot, the Legislature’s redistricting handiwork could end up in federal court anyway — because it usually does. And Texas lawmakers don’t have a good track record: they have violated the Voting Rights Act in every redistricting cycle since 1970 with racially gerrymandered districts.
To solve the dilemma of partisan districting, “voters need to get angry, and voters need to turn out,” writes David Daley, author of a 2016 book on redistricting whose title is unprintable in a family newspaper but whose subtitle is “The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy.”
“The vote is being rigged to favor a limited partisan interest and a shrinking older, whiter and more conservative demographic,” Daley maintains. “Anyone opposed to this use of corrosive assault on our most basic and valuable democratic right, the vote itself, must fight this deception and fraud as aggressively and strategically as those who would tilt things to their favor.”
Robo-umps are likely to make it to the Bigs before Texas establishes an independent redistricting commission. It could be, though, that Texas is changing so quickly and so dramatically that partisan mapmakers simply can’t anticipate how to draw lines that will redound to their benefit. Despite their sophisticated technology, most weren’t anticipating the transformation of fast-growing suburbs from red to blue in the past 10 years.
Bottom line: Texans dedicated to effective, responsive governance should know that redistricting is important and that alternatives exist. They should get mad at the fact that Texas lawmakers aren’t even considering those alternatives. And they should get mad enough that they turn out to vote in numbers that not even the wiliest, most self-serving, most unscrupulous mapmaker can thwart.