Looking at the list of candidates for the 140 state legislative races on this year\'s ballot, one might never realize there are roughly the same number of registered Democrats and Republicans in Florida.
In more than a quarter of those races -- 39 -- candidates are running without opposition. They won their seats just by meeting the filing deadline.
That\'s bound to keep happening as long as legislators are free after every 10-year census to draw districts with a clear majority of voters inclined to support incumbents or their parties. A combination of extensive data on voters and sophisticated computers has made legislators more adept than ever in customizing districts.
But those districts often are contorted and cut through multiple cities or counties. They dilute communities\' common interest.
EDITORIAL
We think: An effort to reduce predictability in political districts deserves support
Legislators who represent such safe districts are less accountable to voters. They are more likely to cater to their party\'s base in office than to seek bipartisan solutions to pressing problems.
Florida\'s term limits for legislators also work against competition for seats. Challengers often put off running until an incumbent is forced to leave office.
A bipartisan group advocating redistricting reform in Florida, FairDistrictsFlorida.org, is now pushing a plan to amend the state constitution. The plan would require legislators to draw compact, community-based districts without regard to partisan makeup.
Fixing the redistricting process may not be easy. But unless it is changed, voters won\'t get the choices they deserve.
May 8, 2008
Redistricting: Making it fair
The Times-Union
People chuckled at the wishbone-shaped district that U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown represented a few years ago.
But at least those lines eventually were redrawn, under a court order, to a less-contorted shape.
Not so in the case of City Council District 11, represented by Ray Holt. It looks like a giant helmet and nose guard, stretching from the Beaches, across northern Jacksonville and down to the most remote southwest reaches of the city.
Nor has anything been done about state Senate District 3, represented by Jacksonville native Charlie Dean of Citrus County.
Dean\'s district dodges and darts haphazardly across parts of more than a dozen counties - including Leon, where it loosely resembles a miniature finger.
Politicians have always "gerrymandered" - or rigged district boundary lines for their benefit.
But, in the past, it was discreet. Now, it\'s blatant.
What\'s wrong with packing as many Democrats in some districts as possible, and as many Republicans as possible in others, to help incumbents get re-elected?
- Voter turnout is abysmally low when the outcome isn\'t in doubt - and disinterest in affecting public policy soon follows.
- An officeholder is more likely to be radical and stridently partisan if the seat is "safe."
- Gridlock is more likely when members of a legislative body don\'t need support from independent voters and members of the other party to get re-elected.
- Generally, there\'s no reason to think incumbents would do better than newcomers. Often, an infusion of new ideas would be nice.
- Incumbents don\'t need help. They already have many advantages - the ability to call press conferences and claim credit for local projects that might have been funded no matter who represented their districts, for example.
Fortunately, a group called Fair Districts Florida is seeking a constitutional ban on gerrymandering.
The best plan is to require that districts be as square and compact as possible, so long as they don\'t split counties.
And lines shouldn\'t be drawn to help a party, incumbent or anyone else.
Above all else, this should be done as a constitutional amendment rather than statutory law - so it can\'t easily be changed back to the old system when a different party takes power.
Make politicians earn re-election; don\'t let it continue being an entitlement.
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Friday, March 7, 2008; A16
A powerful voice acknowledges the harm caused by noncompetitive congressional districts.
THE ABSENCE of competitive congressional districts takes a toll on the political process. As one keen observer of the matter told us yesterday, with "polarizing, tough issues" such as immigration or the war in Iraq, members of Congress are "worried about taking a rational position" because they fear being punished in primaries by challengers questioning their ideological purity. "So you see the tendency is for these congressmen to head to the flanks to fend off the primary [challenge.] They have no worry about the general election."
The surprising thing in this statement is not the content but the speaker: the president of the United States. In a meeting with The Washington Post editorial board yesterday, President Bush touched on topics from free trade to immigration, but one of his most illuminating answers came when we asked why he had not been more successful in finding the common ground he talked about as a presidential candidate and whether he thought his successor, whoever he or she may be, would be able to do better. Mr. Bush\'s analysis of the structural problems that have interfered with his ability to accomplish things is correct -- and it points, unhappily, to problems that are likely to plague the next president as well. Certainly the president didn\'t cite this as the only factor inhibiting bipartisanship. We don\'t think it is, either, but it is one that is real and fixable.
We have long warned about the pernicious consequences of entrenched incumbency and gerrymandered congressional districts. Such districts, as the president noted, produce a Congress more ideologically polarized than the electorate it represents. A House of Representatives in which members need only tend to their bases may be good for those reelected to the majority of seats year after year, but it is bad for the country when moderates in both parties are increasingly squeezed out of the process. Politicians forced to the ideological fringes produce bad legislation or, more often, partisan gridlock that results in no legislation at all on the crucial issues facing the country. Enormous sums are devoted to the scant handful of truly competitive races. A more vibrant process would not provide a panacea for all that ails the modern politics, but it would remove one roadblock to the ability to find common legislative ground and forge common-sense solutions.
The temptation for Mr. Bush\'s critics will be to dismiss his observations as too little, too late, from a tainted source. After all, Mr. Bush\'s party benefited enormously from the outrageous mid-cycle redistricting engineered in Mr. Bush\'s home state of Texas and with the help of his political architect, Karl Rove. The Texas redistricting took an existing problem and helped raise it to a disturbing new level by promoting the notion of having legislatures redraw lines between censuses, whenever one side or another seized the majority, however fleetingly. The president wasn\'t exactly lamenting the absence of competitive districts or calling for structural reform then. Fair enough, but the president\'s point remains an important one. There are various ways to address this situation, whether on a national or state-by-state level, and introduce rationality and nonpartisanship into what threatens to become an even uglier process. Mr. Bush\'s point may come late in his presidency, but it is nonetheless an important one.
"Proposal would reshape districts"
St. Petersburg Times
By ADAM C. SMITH, Times Political Editor
Published September 27, 2007
Does it make sense for Florida to have contorted congressional districts that wind through half a dozen counties?
Not to the government watchdog group Common Cause, which last year spent more than $3-million trying to revamp how Florida political districts are drawn but couldn\'t even get the matter on the ballot.
Now Common Cause is trying again, only much more cautiously.
A Common Cause-backed political committee called FairDistrictsFlorida.org has asked the Florida secretary of state to review two proposed amendments to the Florida Constitution, to be put on the ballot in 2010.
Leaders of the effort include chairwoman Ellen Freidin, a Democratic lawyer in Miami who served on the 1998 Constitution Revision Commission and Republican former Comptroller Bob Milligan and Democratic former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno.
Unlike 2006, when advocates proposed creating a supposedly nonpartisan commission to draw districts, this time Common Cause is merely trying to mandate that lawmakers draw compact districts without trying to help or hurt any political party. Separate ballot questions would cover legislative districts and congressional districts.
Critics say gerrymandered districts are why incumbents so rarely lose re-election and make members of Congress and the Legislature less accountable to voters.
"Really what is lacking in the Constitution is the ability for anyone to challenge these redistricting plans that get passed," said Ben Wilcox, executive director of Common Cause Florida.
The Florida Supreme Court rejected the 2006 ballot proposal for a redistricting commission on technical grounds.
To get on the ballot in 2010, the group will need more than 600,000 signatures, which costs millions of dollars. "We\'re going to be going in incremental stages," said Wilcox, who has no commitment for major funding from Common Cause nationally. "We don\'t want to be under the same kind of gun that we were under the last time."
Adam C. Smith can be reached at asmith@sptimes.com or 727 893-8241.
Proposed ballot summary: "Legislative districts or districting plans may not be drawn to favor or disfavor an incumbent or political party. Districts shall not be drawn to deny racial or language minorities the equal opportunity to participate in the political process and elect representatives of their choice. Districts must be contiguous. Unless otherwise required, districts must be compact, as equal in population as feasible, and where feasible must make use of existing city, county and geographical boundaries."
© 2007 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
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As of last week, 47,000 people had signed petitions to place two Constitutional amendment proposals on the 2010 ballot, said Ben Wilcox, chairman of FairDistrictsFlorida.org, the political action committee collecting the signatures on redistricting measures. Given signature-gathering activity over the holiday weekend, Wilcox estimates the number of signatures at 50,000 or more by now.
To reach the next step in the process, a Supreme Court review of the proposed ballot questions, the reform coalition will have to gather about 61,000 signatures on each petition. They will need to submit about 611,000 verified signatures to the state via the state’s Supervisors of Elections by Feb. 1 of 2010 in order for the questions to appear on the ballot that year.
Wilcox, who also heads Common Cause Florida, was part of the drive to ask voters in 2006 to create an independent commission to draw legislative and Congressional district lines. The Supreme Court threw out that ballot question, finding that it violated the single-subject requirement for ballot questions posed by petition.
“We’ve given up on the idea of creating an independent commission,” Wilcox said, adding. “We’re trying to do is place standards in the Constitution” for drawing state and federal district lines.
FairDistrictsFlorida.org is simultaneously gathering petition signatures to place two questions on the 2010 ballot, one that would toughen redistricting standards for Congressional districts and another that would do the same for legislative districts. The state Legislature would retain its authority to set the district boundaries.
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November 10, 2007![](\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/2005/03/26/PH2005032604413.jpg\")
A Chance for Common Sense
. . . For far too long, the party in power has taken advantage of the opportunity to redraw districts to squeeze out opposition incumbents and maximize the prospects of its party\'s candidates. Such an approach -- and Republicans and Democrats are equally to blame -- has led to political maps that distort the voice and will of the voters for the sake of the parties. . . .
For the full editorial go to: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/09/AR2007110902171.html
The Miami Herald
Sun, Mar. 02, 2008Budget cuts, infighting mar session prospects
BY LAURA FIGUEROA* * *
Statewide, the House has lost nine Republican seats in the past two years, but it is unlikely that any of the seats up for grabs in Miami-Dade will switch parties, State Rep. David Rivera, R-Miami, said. They are either in majority Republican districts like Hialeah, or majority Democrat districts like Miami Beach.