Thinking Arizona
Facts to Inform the Public Discourse
All Legislative Districts Are Not Created Equal
November 15, 2010
The three legislative districts covering Arizona’s northern tier are perfectly divided between registered Republicans and Democrats. Well, okay – the 116,652 Democrats outnumber the 116,548 Republicans by 104 votes.
Judging just by the sheer numbers, one would expect every election to be a donnybrook among those seeking the Senate seat and the two House seats in each of the three districts.
But no . . . that’s not the way it works. The results of the past four elections shows that Republicans are all but guaranteed six of the nine seats. The Democrats are guaranteed three.
“Guaranteed” in the sense that the margins of victory approached 2:1 and in some cases 3:1. Choose the term… walkovers, blowouts, mismatches. The futility of it is such that over the course of the last four election cycles, 14 of the 36 seats went uncontested. This fall, candidates for four of the nine seats are unopposed.
Thinking Arizona graphic by Tony Bustos
That’s because party registration in the three districts is anything but equally divided:
District 1 brims over with 53,000 Republicans to only 31,000 Democrats.
In District 2, it’s the Democrats who brim over. The district has only 14,400 Republicans to 55,500 Democrats.
District 3 musters 49,200 Republicans to 30,200 Democrats.
With numerical disparities like that, it’s easy to see why the Republicans end up with the six seats of Districts 1 and 3. And why the Democrats control the three seats of District 2.
Intentional, not a fluke
The unequal division is not attributable to some fluke of geography. It did not result from skulduggery, nor nefarious power plays. It was done intentionally by the Independent Redistricting Commission in response to two of the higher-order mandates it faced:
- The massive Navajo reservation in northeastern Arizona had to be kept intact in one legislative district. This is in response to the dictates of the U.S. Voting Rights Act, which protects the voting power of minorities. Section 5 of that act requires that changes such as redistricting not have a “retrogressive” effect on minorities and their ability to elect, if they choose to do so, minority representation.
- The Navajo voters, while sufficient in number to make up the majority of the district, had to be supplemented with enough other voters from somewhere nearby to fill out the district. This is in response to the one person – one vote rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court requiring all of a state’s legislative districts to be of roughly equal population.
The solution to these dual requirements was District 2, which gathers together parts – but not all – of the four northern counties. Those sections of Apache, Navajo, Coconino and Mohave counties that are home to the Navajo, Hopi, Havasupai and Hualapai reservations all were put into District 2.
Whatever method the Redistricting Commission then used to expand the majority Navajo district to the necessary population level was going to make somebody unhappy. The choice was to toss in Flagstaff.
That could be done only by excising the city, the capital of Coconino County, from the other parts of the county all around it. The neighbors went elsewhere; Flagstaff landed in District 2. With that move, all the component parts of District 2 happened to have, according to voter registration figures, a heavy Democratic tilt.
The remainders of the four counties were parked in Districts 1, 3 or 5. The southern parts of Apache and Navajo counties went into District 5. Almost all of Mohave County went into District 3, as did a small corner of Coconino. The region of Coconino surrounding Flagstaff went into District 1. Current registration figures show all these areas lean Republican.
The same Voting Rights Act requirements apply to the entire state. Arizona, along with Alaska and seven states in the Deep South, must get pre-approval for any and all redistricting changes from the U.S. Justice Department.
In the case of District 2, the need was to preserve the voting rights of Navajos. And indeed, two of District 2’s three elected representatives are Navajo. The need around the rest of the state is to protect the voting power of Hispanics. Under pressure from the Justice Department, the Redistricting Commission drew the boundaries accordingly.
The result, because of the tendency of minorities to vote Democratic, is eight legislative districts on which Democrats have an ironclad grip. All but one – District 28 in Pima County – are majority-minority districts.
End result favors Republicans
But this is a “zero-sum game”, in the words of Steve Lynn, the Tucson independent who has chaired the Redistricting Commission since its inauguration in 2001. Every registered Democrat whom the commission drew into a district to protect minority interests was therefore not available to balance out Republicans elsewhere.
That resulted in the creation of 13 districts in which, as with Districts 1 and 3, Republicans have a major registration advantage, ranging from 10 to 23 percentage points. In all but one of those districts over the past four elections, the Republicans have won every time. The one exception to that pattern is made up for by another district in Maricopa County that has less of a registration edge but still has universally elected Republicans.
The end result is that two-thirds of the seats in the Senate and House are pretty much decided in the primary election.
And even though the Republican registration edge in the state is now down to 3.8 percentage points (from 5.6 in 2002), the GOP goes into the general election with effective control over nearly half of the seats in the Legislature (13 of 30 in the Senate, and 26 of 60 in the House.) By comparison, Democrats have control of 8 Senate seats and 16 in the House.
Competing ideals
The commission assumed the reins of the redistricting process in 2001. Lynn, a registered independent from Tucson, was joined by two Republicans — James Huntwork of Phoenix and Daniel Elder of Tucson — and two Democrats — Andi Minkoff of Phoenix and Joshua Hall of St. Johns.
In keeping with the intent of voters who created the panel with passage of Proposition 106 in 2000, all five said their goal was to draw both legislative and congressional districts that were competitive. But they quickly found – to their frustration, according to Lynn – that their ability to do so was sharply limited by the rest of their mandate.
The commission was required to consider population equality, minority representation, compactness, respect for community boundaries, and federal law. Making districts competitive was a sixth goal, but it was to be pursued only to the extent that it caused “no significant detriment to the other goals.”
Fully achieving the two goods of creating districts that are competitive and protecting the voting interests of minorities turns out to be an impossible task. They work at cross purposes with each other. One can be accomplished only to the detriment of the other. And it was made clear to the commissioners, again according to Lynn, that the requirements of the Voting Rights Act took precedence.
The ambiguity, which ended up in a court fight, is in how far one needs to go to adequately protect minority interests. In that minorities turn out to vote in somewhat lower proportions than others, the commission needed to put more than a simple majority of the protected classes in those districts it designated as majority minorities. The question was how many more.
How much is enough?
Critics such as Paul Eckstein, the Phoenix lawyer who brought suit over the redistricting plan when it was released in 2002, say the commission went overboard in packing the minority districts with many too many Democrats.
While acknowledging that the circumstances of each district must be determined separately, Eckstein cites District 14 as an example of where he says the commission chose to go beyond the recommendations of its own experts.
District 14, a majority minority district in central Phoenix where Democrats have a registration differential of 26.5 percentage points, is plenty safe for that party’s candidates. The Republicans have not contested the Senate seat for the last four elections, nor do they have a candidate this fall. Only three Republicans have ventured to run for the two House seats in the four elections, and all were trounced for their efforts.
Some of those extra Democratic voters, the argument goes, could have done Democrats a world of good if they had been placed instead in the more equally divided District 10 just to its north in Phoenix.
But just as Eckstein is passionate and articulate in his criticism, Lynn is passionate and articulate in defense.
Unclear standards
The standards that the state must meet to satisfy the Justice Department on Section 5 are not well defined. Its decision-makers, Lynn says, take the same approach to violations as Justice Potter Stewart took to pornography: “You know it when you see it.”
But he insists the commission did not pack the minority districts with too many Democrats. Having had its first attempt swatted back by the Justice Department, Lynn says he and his colleagues were reluctant to inch up the percentages decimal point by decimal point, and thereby risk putting themselves in the position of making a series of unsuccessful submissions. The time it would have taken to do all that would have extended well beyond the commission’s deadlines. In his view, however, that does not mean the commission chose to play it safe.
He also resists the suggestion that the decision of where to draw boundaries in what are sure to be safe districts is more important than the candidates or the issues or the quality of the campaigns. How else does one explain the unbroken successes of Republicans and Democrats in their respective districts over the course of the last four elections?
But in an interview Lynn declines to accept that the outcomes are a foregone conclusion. To make his case, he goes back one election earlier, to the year 2000, when Jeff Groscott lost his seat in a solidly Republican district in Mesa after the alternative-fuels incentive program he championed went totally awry.
Nine years and millions of dollars of legal proceedings later, Lynn stands by the outcome of the redistricting effort. He is most proud, he says, of the recognition the commission received in 2003 from the Arizona League of Women Voters. The league, which had been one of the two primary sponsors of Proposition 106, honored the five commission members with the award named after its national founder. Lynn figures that means the commission did something right.
They won’t get to do it again. With the results of the 2010 census due out next year and redistricting again right around the corner, a new commission will soon be named. Their task is not simply to tweak the existing boundaries. Their charge, Lynn says, is to take the new census numbers and start from scratch.
Likely they will go their own way. District 2 or its equivalent might not stretch across nine-tenths of the state to incorporate the Democrat-rich parts of four counties. Flagstaff might be reintroduced to its neighbors in Coconino County in addition to or instead of the Navajo Nation to its northeast. Adjustments will have to be made for parts of the state that have grown faster than others. Many if not all legislative districts will have new numbers and new alignments.
What won’t change, however, will be the new commission’s need to cope with the requirements of the Voting Rights Act and the impact it has on the competitiveness, or lack thereof, of Arizona’s legislative districts.
– Richard Gilman
