|
The gerrymander -- that ugly but all-too-common creature -- has thrived in Florida for years.
Serpentine congressional and legislative districts traverse the state everywhere you look. Elections are shockingly uncompetitive, with only three incumbents in the Legislature losing over the past six years (out of 420 elections). And even though Florida's voters are roughly split between the two major parties, one party controls close to two-thirds of the seats in Congress and the Legislature.
Hoping to curb this out-of-control gerrymandering, Florida's voters recently placed FairDistricts Amendments 5 and 6 on the ballot for this fall's elections. These initiatives, sponsored by a nonpartisan group, would ban line-drawers from trying to "favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent." Instead, districts would have to be compact and contiguous, to respect existing political and geographical boundaries, and to safeguard minority voting rights.
The FairDistricts initiatives have been applauded by almost every unbiased observer of the Florida political scene. Major newspapers throughout the state (including The Daytona News-Journal) have endorsed them. The Florida Supreme Court rejected every legal challenge that was mustered against them. As for Florida's voters, almost a million of them signed the petitions for the initiatives.
Opposition to the measures now stems from two sources -- one somewhat unexpected, the other not surprising in the least. The unexpected objections come from certain minority groups who worry that their influence would be diminished if Florida's districts were to undergo substantial change. Fortunately, these fears are unfounded. The initiatives include protections for minority voting rights that are stronger than federal law and far more robust than anything on the books in Florida. For these reasons, the NAACP recently endorsed the measures in the strongest possible terms.
The entirely unsurprising opposition comes from Tallahassee politicians -- the architects and beneficiaries of the gerrymandered status quo. After losing at the Florida Supreme Court, legislative leadership manipulated financial impact statements for the initiatives that were so misleading that the statements had to be redrafted. Most recently, future Senate President Mike Haridopolos and future House Speaker Dean Cannon proposed a third redistricting amendment that will also appear on the fall ballot.
This "poison pill" amendment lacks all of the good ideas that are in the FairDistricts initiatives. It says nothing about blocking plans that stifle competition or advance only a single party's interests. It doesn't require districts to be compact. Its protections for minority voting rights are weak and easily sidestepped. And, most deviously, it would sabotage the FairDistricts initiatives even if they pass. The amendment gives "priority to [its own] standards" over all other provisions, and it states that plans are valid as long as they are "rationally related to the standards contained in this constitution." This amounts to an instruction to the courts never to strike down a district map, no matter how unfair, uncompetitive or bizarre it is.
Unfortunately, the poison pill amendment narrowly passed the Legislature in late April. Knowing they could not win a fair argument about the merits of the FairDistricts initiatives, the politicians in Tallahassee decided to try to confuse the public. Now Florida's voters will be confronted with not two but three redistricting initiatives in the fall -- two designed to stop gerrymandering, the third carefully crafted to preserve the awful status quo while pretending to change it. The politicians' hope, of course, is that the voters will be unable to tell the measures apart. If all three pass, the abuses of the past few years will continue, and the Legislature will enjoy a hearty last laugh.
For Floridians who want real reform (and oppose legislative dirty tricks), the course is therefore clear: Vote for the FairDistricts initiatives, and against the Legislature's cynical amendment. Florida's politics are crying out for some strong medicine -- not for a poison pill.
Russell is the past president and current chairman of the legislative committee of the Florida NAACP. Stephanopoulos is an attorney at Jenner & Block LLP, specializing in election law. Hebert is the executive director of the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center.
|
