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Congressional redistricting is right around the corner next year, and several organizations trying to reduce the influence of state politics on the process of redrawing districts have had modest success.
The coalition called Americans for Redistricting Reform -- a group that includes the Campaign Legal Center, Common Cause and the Republican Main Street Partnership -- has pushed the idea of independent commissions, rather than state legislatures, drawing House districts. Eight states now use commissions, and California voters will decide in a November ballot initiative whether to join them. Florida residents vote in November on a ballot initiative that, while not creating an independent commission, would disallow partisanship in the political mapmaking process.
This modest trend away from politics, though, worries some minority groups, such as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which said in a report this month that independent commissions might do a worse job of protecting minority voting rights than politicians do. "Any proposal to reform the process, any change, shouldn't undo decades of change to allow minorities to participate in the voting process," says Jenigh Garrett, assistant counsel of the defense fund. "Any reform should be careful and measured."
The NAACP says that while an independent commission might reduce the advantage that one party gains by controlling a state's redistricting, it would not necessarily protect districts drawn to help the election of ethnic minorities. The group says any independent commission should be chartered with diverse memberships and specific mandates to preserve districts where a minority is in the majority.
The law on the issue is not entirely clear. The 1965 Voting Rights Act requires states to seek to ensure minority representation in Congress, but the Supreme Court in the 1990s threw out two districts gerrymandered to ensure minority representation.
In Florida, two House members, DemocratCorrine Brown and Republican Mario Diaz-Balart, filed a state lawsuit last month to throw out the ballot initiative. Still, commission advocates nationally see room for compromise. J. Gerald Hebert, executive director of the Campaign Legal Center, notes that the NAACP didn't entirely rule out commissions. "They are careful to suggest that redistricting reform proceed cautiously and include minority communities. And I agree with all of that," he says.
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