PD Editorial: A political strike against fair elections

In a republic, elections allow voters to choose their representatives.

Representatives aren't supposed to choose the voters. But that's what happens when elected officials draw their own districts.

Once every 10 years, following the census, new lines must be drawn in a process called reapportionment. For generations, California legislators, and their proxies, protected incumbents and advanced partisan interests by deftly using demographics and sophisticated political data to create districts where elections were little more than spectacles. Outcomes were foreordained.

The goal was obtaining and retaining power.

Democracy be damned.

In 2008, voters created an independent commission to draw state Senate and Assembly district boundaries. Two years later, voters extended its authority to congressional districts. When the commission produced its first maps after the 2010 census, the districts were more compact and far more competitive than the incumbent-protect plan enacted 10 years earlier by state legislators.

Score one for democracy.

But that victory may be short-lived, at least in regard to congressional districts.

In a case that goes to the U.S. Supreme Court for oral arguments on Monday, Republican state legislators from Arizona claim that allowing an independent redistricting commissions to draw House boundaries is unconstitutional.

Their challenge is based on Article I, Section 4, which says that 'the times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature.'

As a legal matter, the case will probably turn on how the court defines a legislature.

The Arizona legislators want a narrow reading, and their position is supported by the National Conference of State Legislatures and a free-speech group called the Coolidge-Reagan Foundation.

One the other side, there's a range of groups including historians, government reform advocates and three former governors of California, all Republicans: George Deukmejian, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Pete Wilson. They contend that when voters decide initiatives, as they did in creating the California and Arizona redistricting commissions, they act as legislators.

Their view prevailed in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, with a three-judge panel rejecting the plaintiffs' arguments. But the Supreme Court agreed to consider an appeal.

Strip away the constitutional arguments, and Arizona's challenge is a case of sour grapes. Democrats won five of the state's nine House seats under a redistricting plan adopted in 2011. Had GOP legislators drawn the lines, they undoubtedly could have delivered at least one more seat to their party. (Republicans did gain a seat in the 2012 election.)

California has 53 House seats, plus large Democratic majorities in the state Senate and Assembly and a Democratic governor who would draw new congressional boundaries if the independent redistricting commission is deemed unconstitutional.

But the court's ruling shouldn't be driven by the partisan leanings of the justices. They have upheld the right of voters to pass laws through the initiative process, and, consistent with that ruling, they should allow voters to ensure that elections are not undermined by gerrymandering.