HR 1 legislation

I don’t understand all the praise for U.S. Rep. Sarbanes’ 791-page H.R.1 legislation (The Capital, March 4).

My main issue is that it utterly fails to address head-on the most egregious election issue — gerrymandering. Yes, it does provide for “independent commissions” which are to include an equal number of majority party, minority party and other registered voters. But it fails to provide any basic requirements or limitations regarding gerrymandering.

At a minimum, it should include the language used by the three-judge federal panel that found Maryland’s 6th District boundaries unconstitutional, requiring the application of traditional criteria for redistricting — such as “geographic contiguity, compactness, regard for natural boundaries and boundaries of political subdivisions, and regard for geographic and other communities of interest — and without considering how citizens are registered to vote or have voted in the past or to what political party they belong.”

Instead, the legislation requires many progressive ideas which are hard to quantify. As an example, the bill provides that “districts shall provide racial, ethnic, and language minorities with an equal opportunity to participate in the political process and to elect candidates of choice and shall not dilute or diminish their ability to elect candidates of choice whether alone or in coalition with others.”

What does that mean? Should the commission carve out districts based on racial, ethnic and language minority lines?

The bill also prohibits states from undertaking what many believe are necessary steps to ensure an accurate voter roll. For instance, it requires states to allow such questionable actions as same-day voter registration. It also prohibits a state from putting a limit on how many ballots any person could return on behalf of others, a limit many believe is necessary to prevent what is sometimes called “ballot harvesting.”

This new bill is nothing more than an implementation of every progressive idea that has ever been considered without addressing the real underlying problem.