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This column is by Rebecca Rolfes, president of the League of Women Voters of Coastal Georgia.

Between 2000 and 2018, 60% to 80% of seats in the Georgia General Assembly were uncontested. The national average of uncontested elections for statewide offices is 35%.

The 2020 election in November will be no different.

In 2011, Republicans got 53.3% of the popular vote but won 68% of the seats.

In 2018, 438,000 people Democrats, Republicans and otherwise -- who went to the polls and voted for Georgia governor failed to cast a ballot in their state representative race.

If this sounds like minority rule, you would be correct. The reason, say reformers, is partisan gerrymandering which stifles competitive races, depresses voter turnout and turns a democratic majority into a representational minority.

New electoral districts will be drawn next year once data from the 2020 U.S. Census is made available to the states. Redistricting, mandated by Article 1, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution is "a brilliant idea that our founding fathers came up with," says Pat Bryd, executive director of FairDistricts GA. "They said the populations going to change. We want to have these districts and we want to adjust the size of those districts and base the number of districts on the census every 10 years. Its wonderful because it means when population has shifted, the representation can shift too."

State constitutions mimic the U.S. Constitution and carry out statewide redistricting on the same 10-year schedule.

The problem in Georgia is that the same people voted into office will draw lines that can guarantee they will stay in office.

In essence, redistricting is the political issue that underlies all political issues because it determines who votes for whom. When redistricting becomes gerrymandering, it enables politicians to pick their voters instead of voters picking their politicians.

"Why do we have politicians who think its OK to allow rural hospitals to close," Bryd asks. "Why do we have politicians who despise Medicaid? We have the politicians we have because districts were created to give them the power base they need."

Shining a light on an opaque process

Redistricting that becomes gerrymandering the drawing of lines to gain advantage for one party or candidate, or to deprive a specific group of voters of their rights distorts the one person/one vote system of democracy. Racial redistricting is illegal per the Voting Rights Act. Partisan redistricting is not.

"If you cannot have your elected officials reflect the public, if those two things are divorced from each other, then the elected officials are not going to do what the public wants and it doesn't matter how much they vote," says State Sen. Elena Parent (D-Dekalb Co.) , a long-time proponent of reform. "Thats totally divorced from what a democracy is supposed to be. It enables minority rule."

Assuming Republicans retain control of the Georgia House and Georgia Senate in the November elections, State Sen. Matt Brass (R-Newnan), chair of the Senate Redistricting Committee, and his House counterpart Rep. Bonnie Rich (R-Suwanee), will have several bright spotlights trained on them when they meet in special session to begin drawing new state electoral lines, probably sometime next August when the U.S. Census data becomes available. Their work must be complete by the time the General Assembly meets in 2022.

The first spotlight will be questions about the Census itself. The Commerce Department, which oversees the count, tried to add a question about citizenship when the Constitution mandates that everyone who resides in the country must be counted. An attempt to shorten the Census was struck down in court. Responses to the Census questionnaire have been lower than normal in the 60% to 70% range compared to 74% in the 2010 census due to the coronavirus.

The second spotlight will be Georgias history of gerrymandering. Georgia has repeatedly been reprimanded by the Department of Justice for gerrymandered districts. In 2001, the maps were so bad that the DOJ redrew them. The last maps drawn in 2011 were approved by then U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, "the first time in Georgia history since the Voting Rights Act that we not only had our maps approved but a new law was not created because they were so bad," says Sen. Brass.

Georgia, like other states, also periodically redraws lines between the 10-year census counts. In 2015, then Secretary of State Brian Kemp was sued in U.S. District Court for an attempt to gerrymander Districts 105 and 111. The General Assembly tabled the effort.

The third and final spotlight -- and potentially the brightest -- will be the more than $50 million raised by the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC) to fix what it terms a "broken system." The NDRC has endorsed 102 candidates who favor redistricting reform Marcus Thompson, a Democrat, running against Rep. Ron Stephens (R-Savannah) in District 164 among them and is targeting Georgia among 13 states.

The NDRC will spend $103,200 of their war chest in Georgia. Their hope is that Democrats will take control of the Georgia House depriving Republicans of the political trifecta: control of the House and the Senate as well as the governors office.

Reformers say that such an outcome will, at a minimum, improve the fairness and transparency of the redistricting process and might ultimately lead to passage of the Democracy Act. That act, proposed by the ACLU and supported by a coalition of 12 other nonpartisan organizations, would amend the Georgia Constitution to take redistricting out the hands of elected officials and create an independent commission.

Some form of the same reform has been enacted in 21 states. In those states, races tend to be more competitive. Candidates more accurately reflect the electorate with more people of color, more women and more candidates without access to large campaign donations.

Voter Turnout 2018 by savannahnow.com

Behind closed doors

Both those in charge of redistricting at the state level and those favoring reform toss the word transparency around as the key to everything that needs to change.

At present, House and Senate committees meet in special session, crunch numbers from the Census data, look at obvious geographic boundaries to ensure whats called contiguity and at less obvious but equally important community of interest groupings, then hold a series of public hearings around the state to develop districting maps. All of this is tacitly agreed to rather than legally binding.

The Transparency Act, proposed last year by Sen. Parent, mandated that public hearings would be held in each district, that they would be recorded and made available on a website. The adjournment of the General Assembly because of the coronavirus meant that the act never got a hearing. Now Sen. Brass has picked up one of the acts provisions and hopes to hold public hearings in all 180 House districts and 56 Senate districts in the state. He would prefer to hold them in person but, given time, distance and the likely persistence of the coronavirus, some or all may be virtual.

According to Sen. Parent, the supposedly public hearings held as part of the existing process are a "sham, for appearances only," while the redistricting process actually takes place behind closed doors in Atlanta. The crucial difference: The Transparency Act would set a standard that is legally binding. Such legal mandates would be an important first step to improving the process, say reformers. Parent, who was gerrymandered out of her House seat in 2012, intends to pre-file the act in mid-November.

"Their goal in 2011 was to draw maps that gave them a two-thirds supermajority in all chambers," Parent said. "We have districts in Georgia that are one precinct wide and four miles long. Decatur is split into four districts. Statesboro is three. Athens is split in half. Their excuse is that means more representatives fighting for a communitys interest. What it really amounts to is an effort to create majority-minority districts."

With the Transparency Act, Parent was looking for what she calls "a smaller lift," something that would improve the process but be easier to pass than a constitutional amendment.

The Georgia constitution is vague on the subject of redistricting, Byrd says. "It doesn't exist. That's pretty vague. The Georgia Constitution section on redistricting includes only the contiguity section." The North Carolina constitution, by contrast, contains a section guaranteeing free and open elections. Georgias says nothing.

The Georgia Constitution has five sentences about voting rights and redistricting. It has 68 pages on the lottery.

Incremental reforms like the Transparency Act may be the best courseindeed the only courseopen to reformers in the face of politically entrenched opposition.

For Sen. Brass, reforming the system would consist of, first, greater transparency. "To me in today's day and age with technology, theres really no excuse for this not to be the most transparent redistricting weve ever had," he says. "I don't mean that just for our state, I mean nationwide. Theres literally no excuse."

Second, he wants a certain percentage of each body to approve the maps. "You couldn't pass your maps with 91 votes," he says. "We might put it at 66%, 67%, something like that. That would be a good step."

Finally, hed prefer that the state resort to mid-year or mid-decade map changes only under specific circumstances. "I don't think you can ban it outright," he says, "but they would be outliers."

Public outcry

Given that so many candidates will run unopposed in 2020, voters will be given little voice in determining reform vs. the status quo. What they can do, Bryd says, is pay attention. The successful challenge to Kemps attempt to gerrymander two districts in 2015 resulted from a "public outcry" of letter writing, phone calls and testimony from nonpartisan voting rights organizations.

The sad fact is, regardless of who is elected, without an independent commission on redistricting, the party in power will likely try to continue to game the system.

Republicans and Democrats are equally guilty of partisan gerrymandering. The party in power wants to remain in power so there is a strong temptation to draw district lines that ensure that will happen. In 1971, Democrat Andrew Young was drawn out of a Congressional seat by a Republican Redistricting Committee. In 1991, Democrats returned the favor by gerrymandering Rep. Newt Gingrich out of office.

Voters struggle to connect the dots between redistricting and issues that matter to them. According to Parent, however, "redistricting touches every single issue."

Redistricting and its evil twin gerrymandering are complicated, a combination of data crunching and geography. That keeps voters from realizing how important they are. Without knowing why, they begin to feel that their vote makes no difference. Voters should care, however, says Brass, "mainly because you want your vote to matter. If the lines are drawn egregiously as we saw in 2001, when they're drawn that badly and you've got voters packed into one district, you're drowning out a lot of other voices."

Originally posted here:
Viewpoints: Redistricting the biggest political issue no one thinks about - Savannah Morning News