'Will Your Vote Be A Rubber Stamp For The Next Decade?'

The following guest column is about redistricting, which could be the ultimate reform of Pennsylvania government. Unfortunately, redistricting is in the hands of the very same politicians who could be kicked out of office if elections were fair in Pennsylvania.

The Pennsylvania League of Women Voters and Common Cause/PA have issued an op-ed asking some questions about why Democrats are preventing redistricting reform from taking place.

WILL YOUR VOTE BE A RUBBER STAMP FOR THE NEXT DECADE?

Last week, two Philadelphia Democrats acted to suppress votes in the House and Senate State Government committees on redistricting reform. Redistricting is the most important governmental process people notice only once every 10 years, when they realize their legislative districts have been tortured into an even more bizarre shape than they were before, and their counties, townships, cities, and boroughs have been sliced and diced to suit the needs of legislators who want to pick their preferred voters.

Rep. Babette Josephs, chair of the House committee, pulled H.B. 2420, a major redistricting bill, from the agenda. Sen. Anthony Williams moved successfully to table a similar bill and amendment in the Senate committee that would also have made redistricting less partisan and protective of incumbency.

Both legislators assert that because Robert Zech, the director of the nonpartisan Legislative Reference Bureau, which is charged in H.B. 2420 with administering redistricting, feels his staff lacks expertise to carry out the process and expresses anxiety that redistricting would "directly involve partisan politics [and] compromise the reputation of the Bureau," nearly 12 million Pennsylvanians should continue to live in the second most gerrymandered state in the US. (Georgia, where would we be without you?)

Gerrymandering makes it harder for citizens to connect with their legislators, who may only show up at election time, and harder for challengers to unseat incumbents. It serves the interests of a small number of politicians by making them less accountable to the voters and more comfortable assuming that "their" district is their personal property.

The decision to block reform is ridiculous on so many levels. First, the expertise question: In Iowa, the model for nonpartisan redistricting, one Legislative Services attorney and one computer specialist, plus a temporary data worker, carry out the process every decade. When not doing redistricting, the attorney does exactly what PA LRB attorneys do and the computer specialist provides technical support for Legislative Services.

If Pennsylvania, because of its more complex geography, would require more effort to map fairly, Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, and Rep. Samuelson, HB 2420’s prime sponsor, have always assumed that the LRB would hire experts from one of Pennsylvania’s many colleges and universities.

Second, the partisanship problem: The whole point of HB 2420 is to remove partisanship, and the criteria for redistricting explicitly rule out partisan considerations including voting records and addresses of incumbents and their potential challengers. In addition, the transparency of the process makes it easy to demonstrate a lack of partisan bias.

Rep. Josephs, in an attempt to "explain" her decision has done the following:

* Raised the specter of "a bureaucrat making hundreds of critical decisions," which is simply false. HB 2420 requires both consultation with an advisory commission and publication of all communications dealing with redistricting, in addition to a series of public hearings and a clear-cut avenue for legal challenges to proposed plans. Apparently Josephs and Williams much prefer the current system, in which the critical decisions are made by entrenched political leaders who are not accountable to the general electorate because they don’t run in the districts they have disemboweled, but in their own carefully crafted fiefdoms (e.g., Rep. John Perzel).

* Told several people that she doesn’t think HB 2420 can pass. But the bill has 94 co-sponsors, far more than any similar bill introduced any time in the last 20 years and only nine votes short of passage. If she doesn’t let it out of committee, it certainly won’t pass, but the bill’s supporters are willing to work with her on the details of the bill – if she could only be explicit about what she wants and would be willing to work for.

* Expressed a half-hearted commitment to "examining alternative proposals to improve the process." If she means that, she could put HB 84, Rep. Tangretti's redistricting bill, on the State Government Committee calendar as well as H.B. 2420 and give interested committee members (17 of the 29 are co-sponsors of one or both bills) a chance to discuss, amend, and vote on them. HB 84 does not utilize the LRB but creates an independent temporary bureau, established by a bipartisan, appointed committee, for redistricting. The bill avoids every element of HB 2420 that Rep. Josephs dislikes. So why has it been languishing in committee since Jan. 30, 2007?

HB 2420 itself can probably be improved upon, but that will only happen if people press Rep. Josephs to work with reformers to give Pennsylvanians fairer representation in the next decade’s elections.

Lora Lavin
Vice President for Issues and Action
League of Women Voters of PA

Sandra Christianson
Vice Chair for Issues
Common Cause/PA