Lessons from New York’s redistricting debacle

Changing the state Constitution is hard. It happens only when something has gone horribly wrong and needs a permanent fix. The year 2014 brought us one of those moments. New Yorkers recognized that the process for redistricting our electoral maps was utterly broken.

Redistricting occurs every 10 years, when voting lines are redrawn to account for demographic changes based on the federal census. Before 2014, legislators drew district lines however they pleased. Incumbents protected themselves by drawing maps rigged in their favor.

Sometimes this means one political party skewing the lines to keep power. Sometimes it means drawing challengers out of a district to protect incumbents against even same-party challengers. Either way, history has shown that if legislators can engineer their way into an illicit insurance policy, they will. We all know the adage, “don’t let the fox guard the henhouse.”

In that spirit, New Yorkers and their Legislature overwhelmingly approved and enacted a constitutional amendment to end redistricting gamesmanship. They adopted an independent mapping process that prohibited partisan gerrymandering. With this amendment, voters now had a guarantee that, when it comes to elections, fairness would finally trump party politics.

This is important when we look at what is happening around the country. New York cannot credibly criticize voter suppression in other parts of the country if our own electoral maps are rigged.

So, the 2014 constitutional amendment was pivotal. New York proclaimed itself above the hyper-partisan fray exploding across the country, as red-state politicians find ever-more devious ways to suppress blue votes. New York’s new constitutional process was designed to ensure that new voting maps were prepared fairly with citizen participation, bipartisan leadership and based only on demographic shifts, not partisan goals.

But before that independent process could play out, the Legislature concocted a scheme to take back control of redistricting. Acting as if the constitutional amendment had never been passed, the Legislature drew its own maps just as it had in the old days. The result was predictable: The maps favored one party over another and boosted incumbents over challengers to deliver anti-democratic advantages to those in power.

Fortunately, the Constitution is not optional. Thankfully, the congressional, Senate and Assembly maps have now been voided by the courts because the Legislature violated the 2014 amendment.

We now are in the middle of getting maps that have been fairly drawn. But some work remains. The Senate and congressional maps were redrawn by a court-appointed expert, and the court moved the primary elections for those seats to Aug. 23.

But the Assembly map is a different story. The primary for Assembly and state-wide races will proceed in June, victimizing voters with the cost and inconvenience of a second primary. While a court has voided the Assembly map, voters are still in a bind. Since the Assembly primary date was not aligned with the congressional and state Senate races in August, time ran out to redraw the Assembly maps. Voters are stuck this year with an unconstitutional map.

The craven strategy of the Legislature’s army of lawyers, paid for with taxpayers’ money, has prevailed for now. They slowed the litigation with every technicality in the book, hoping they could run out the clock. Their cynical strategy worked.

Now, as early voting is underway, voters are casting ballots for Assembly and other races based on unconstitutional voting districts. The one bright spot is that the Assembly map will be redrawn before the next election, so it cannot be used in the next decade of elections, which was the Legislature’s illicit goal. It is even possible to try to force a special election in 2023 to cure the constitutional problem from the current election.

Sadly, the Legislature has learned nothing from the mess it created. Inevitably, they will use more tax money to pay these same lawyers to try to find a way to return control of re-drawing the Assembly map back to the politicians themselves. This hustle will only work if the courts let it happen. They shouldn’t take the rotten bait.

Our fight for a fully constitutional Assembly map — one fairly drawn by a court-appointed expert, who makes changes based on demographic shifts alone, without regard to political considerations — will continue. Make no mistake, members of the Assembly, who New Yorkers elected, have proven themselves committed to violating our Constitution. While we will make our voices heard in court, we hope the people will make their voices heard at the ballot box by voting against any Assembly member who supported this scheme, and especially those at the top who orchestrated it.