YOUR BORING BALLOTS

Mayor should play no role in purchase review

Re “Time for independent 101 Ash Street probe” (March 24): I could not agree more with your stance on independent review.

One concern I would have is if San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria was part of the City Council that approved the purchase, he may not be the best one to appoint an “independent reviewer.” If he was part of the problem, he can’t be relied on to get to the truth.

Neighborhoods being destroyed for money

Re “Bills look to end zoning for single-family housing“(March 24): Eventually there will no longer be a distinction between residential and commercial areas. Residential areas are being destroyed by raising height limits, short-term vacation rentals, accessory dwelling units and no offstreet parking requirements. In my block, a fourunit apartment building was built with three-deep

Where are services for all the new people?

Re “College Area ‘granny flats’ don’t help with housing crisis” (March 25): It appears almost certain that single-family zones will officially disappear. This is already happening. In the College Area, nearly 200 accessory dwelling units (please don’t call them granny flats) concentrated near campus replaced single homes. Large ADUS can replace a family of four with 10 or more adults, possibly doubling the population while eliminating backyard open space.

My question: As increased

It’s not the filibuster but abuse of it at issue

Re “What should be done to the filibuster?” (March 25): Discussion about the filibuster needs a more nuanced analysis rather than a binary one — either ending it or not. The origin of the filibuster was to prevent a cloture vote by a simple majority and deny further discussion of the issue. It required continued discussion by one member or another on the issue. Abuse began with a member reading from a dictionary or reciting food recipes having nothing to do with the issue,

just to extend “discussion” and deny a vote.

Next came further changes allowing filibusters to simply be declared and not actually executed by continuing discussion of the matter by the members. Let’s simply go back to the original filibuster requirements and make it hard to do, as intended. Or we can put the burden on the minority in other ways.

GOP hurting its own brand with voter bills

Re “GA governor signs sweeping election bill” (March 26): The time has come to make a needed change in our political nomenclature. With Republicans having introduced more than 250 bills in state legislatures to restrict voting rights, and having already succeeded in passing such legislation in several states, the GOP deserves a new label to reflect such efforts. It needs to be renamed the Anti-democratic Party.

If this is done, the party’s relationship to the other major party will be clear as it stands in stark opposition to the Democratic Party,

The Senate is taking up a big bill on voting rights. What do you think the 50 Republican members are going to do?

A. Invite the Democrats to a wine-tasting party in which the last 10 lawmakers standing get to make all the decisions.

B. Have Mitch Mcconnell announce that “as much as I would like to defeat this bill, effective government is more important than partisan advantage.”

C. Filibusterfilibusterfilibuster.

Yeah, yeah. Terrible to feel so cynical, isn’t it? Well, we’ll see. The House put a lot of important reforms in the bill, many of them aimed at making it easier for citizens to vote. But today let’s look at another piece of the story that doesn’t get enough attention. Gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is the age-old practice of trying to fix the boundaries of electoral districts to make sure your side gets as much advantage as possible. It’s named for Elbridge Gerry, who was governor of Massachusetts in 1812 after the legislature passed a bill setting the lines of state Senate districts to give his party a big boost. That required a lot of creative map-drawing, and critics thought one of the districts wound up looking like a salamander — or, wags said, a “Gerry-mander.”

Now the bill wasn’t Gerry’s idea. His son-in-law said he found it “exceedingly disagreeable” and pretty much all he did was reluctantly sign it. But it’s an excellent lesson in how careful you have to be if you’re planning to become a historical figure. You can devote your life to creating a new nation, championing the Bill of Rights, getting elected as James Madison’s vice president, and in the end the one thing people will remember about you is a district shaped like an amphibian.

The bill now headed toward Mcconnell’s dustheap would require states to establish independent redistricting commissions when they prepare new maps for their legislatures and congressional districts based on the 2020 census. In days of yore this was a job for a bunch of guys sitting around a table full of maps, slowly divvying things up. Now it’s done with computers, which makes it much, much easier to game the system.

“You have software that can give you 10,000 distinct variations in a number of minutes,” said Edwin Bender, executive director of the National Institute on Money in Politics. Check out its website for an index that will tell you, for instance, that in the fast-growing state of Texas, only 9 percent of the 2018 state legislative races featured a real contest. A large chunk didn’t have even a second contender.

Gerrymandering is one of the main reasons many of us vote in elections in which the minority party has about as much chance of winning as ascending into heaven. There are a few saintly lawmakers dedicated to reform, but plenty just concentrate on making the system work

which is trying to insure Americans have the right and opportunity to vote.

Have Republicans even considered the fact that by blatantly making it more difficult to vote and trying to overturn an election that it hurts their party as well?

After a while, no one, Democrat or Republican, is going to trust the integrity of elections in this country.

Greatest Generation can still do great things

Re “Easy gun access, not voter fraud, should be GOP’S big concern” (March 25): After the litany of “the worst collection of troubles I’ve seen since World War II,” the letter writers wonder where and how we will find solutions. for them.

Pretend you’re a member of Congress. (Go ahead — pretend.) An angel appears to you with two maps of your seven-district state. In one, your party has at least a 40-50 percent chance of winning six. In the other, it has no hope whatsoever of taking four; a 65 percent chance of getting two; and a 97.7 percent chance of winning the one in which you happen to be running.

What would you do? If you quickly choose the very competitive option, congratulations! You are a person of strong moral principle who is highly unlikely to ever run for public office.

Right now in Louisiana, voters are picking a successor to Cedric Richmond, who gave up his House seat for a job as a White House adviser. The district, which resembles a very long and thin dragon balancing a ball

We need a reform-populist movement dedicated to dividing states up more fairly.

on its nose, seems drawn to squish in as many Democrats — particularly Black Democrats — as humanly possible. (The rest of the state gets left to the Republican mapmakers.) So it was no surprise that it was all Democrats who came out on top in a special election this month, and two of them will face off in a runoff in April.

I am represented in Washington by Congressman Jerry Nadler, the powerful Democratic chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. One conservative publication tastefully described his district as something “that skips around the city like a bachelorette party bus.”

That would presume that the partygoers wanted to start on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, travel all the way down the borough across the Brooklyn Bridge and then down a little tiny passage to Borough Park. It looks less like a salamander than a Pekingese on a leash that stretches along Brooklyn and over to a very sturdy pole that’s stuck far away on the city’s northern end.

This mapmaking affects everything. Remember that anti-transgender bathroom law North Carolina passed in 2016? The folks who voted on it came from a brilliantly gerrymandered state legislature in which Republicans, who got only about half the statewide vote, nevertheless controlled a supermajority.

Democrats are well aware that they’ve been losing the redistricting game, but it’s going to take a lot of effort for them to turn things around. At which point they’d probably start redrawing future maps to their advantage. What we need is a reform-populist movement dedicated to dividing the states up more fairly. It’s up to you to start complaining, people. Elbridge Gerry is watching from above.

is on Twitter, @gailcollins.

Since they have been around longer than I, they should know that we find solutions by looking for them, most often within. But, knowing the question to be somewhat rhetorical, and realizing they missed the point of the same day’s U-T article about Cindy Spiva, Team Hoyt and Ainsley’s Angels, I encourage them to read it again. Then browse braverangels.org, or find their nearest homeless shelter, or volunteer at the NAACP, or join a book club reading Layla Saad, or attend meetings of their faith community’s social action committee, or donate to defeat Mitch Mcconnell.

The Greatest Generation may not have been perfect, but they knew how to solve problems by refusing to surrender. It’s up to us now.

The San Diego Union-tribune letters policy

The Union-tribune encourages community dialogue on public matters. Letters are subject to editing, must be 150 words or less and include a full name, community of residence and a daytime telephone number, although the number will not be published. Please email letters to letters@sduniontribune.com. These and additional letters can be viewed online at sandiegouniontribune.com/letters