Thinking Arizona
Facts to Inform the Public Discourse
Calls for Competition Tempered by Reality
December 9, 2010
The desire to make more legislative districts competitive is getting a fair amount of cachet as the process begins to redistrict Arizona for the next 10 years. The much larger challenge though is in the doing.
Competitive districts attracted strongly worded support in the just-issued report of the 97th Arizona Town Hall. See more on this. A former state legislator has created an organization called Arizona Competitive Districts Coalition, both to promote the benefits and serve as something of a watchdog on the process. The redistricting question was even posed to Sandra Day O’Connor, who began public life as a state legislator before eventually going on to a distinguished career on the U.S. Supreme Court, at a recent meeting of the Southern Arizona Leadership Council.
The appeal is evident. One can hypothesize that competitive districts will pump up interest among the electorate, cut down on extreme partisanship in the Legislature, and increase the accountability of legislators.
At the same time, it is equally apparent is that those notions might not be popular with entrenched incumbents and the political parties they represent. And while the ideals might shine in concept, shadows lurk over its execution.
Problem of Numbers
Even if the process can be made devoid of politics, achieving competitiveness will hinge on interpretation, method, and sheer numbers. As for the latter, no matter how one cuts it, there simply may not be enough Democrats to go around.
For Democrats, the numbers problem is two-fold:
– They are out-numbered by registered Republicans, in the latest figures available, by 129,000 voters, or 4.1 percent of the total.
– They must be overloaded into minority-majority districts to meet the requirements of the U.S. Voting Rights Act. Depending on the assumptions one makes about what about the Justice Department will require, roughly 80,000 more Democrats than Republicans will be siphoned off to assure minority voting rights will be protected in eight or so of the state’s 30 legislative districts. That will assure Democrats will control those districts.
The combination of the two means, however, that there will be, again roughly speaking, about 210,000 fewer Democrats than Republicans for the remaining 22 districts. How one might somehow go about balancing the imbalance is a question of interpretation and approach.
The referendum passed by Arizona voters in 2000 that created the citizen’s redistricting panel is very specific in spelling out what the commission must accomplish in drawing the state’s legislative and congressional districts. But one important sentence has been open to interpretation.
Matter of Interpretation
The law, passed in the form of an amendment to the state constitution, dictates that the Independent Redistricting Commission should first lay out a grid-like pattern of districts of equal population and then adjust the grid to accommodate a variety of factors. It must comply with the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. Voting Rights Act, and then “to the extent practicable” create districts that are geographically compact and contiguous, respect communities of interest, and use existing geographic dividers such as town and county boundaries.
Then, in the sixth clause of the paragraph in question, the amendment goes on to read that “to the extent practicable, competitive districts should be favored where to do so would create no significant detriment to the other goals.” (Emphasis added.)
The original Independent Redistricting Commission and its legal counsel interpreted this to mean, according to the commission’s outgoing chairman, Steve Lynn, that the competitive goal was “sixth, last, and subordinate” to the other goals. The commission went about its business, creating the congressional and legislative maps that are now expiring, with this belief in mind. Districts were drawn based on all the mandated considerations, except competitiveness, and the resulting maps were subjected to public hearings, delivered to the Arizona secretary of state, and submitted to the Justice Department. Only later, when the commission had to tweak the legislative map to address other objections of the Justice Department, did it first look at the question of competitiveness.
A lawsuit challenging the commission’s approach and the result wound its way through the state’s courts for much of the decade before finally being put to rest by the state Supreme Court in 2008. The court ruled that the commission had fulfilled its constitutional duties and that to quibble with the result would be to overstep the court’s role.
Overlooked Passage
However, buried deep in the majority opinion, is an important passage that went largely overlooked at the time.
While agreeing with the appellate court’s view that the commission must refrain from establishing competitive districts if it is not practicable to do so or would cause significant detriment to the other goals, the high court opined that “does not, contrary to the commission’s assertion, mean that the competitiveness goal is less mandatory than the other goals, can be ignored, or should be relegated to a secondary role.”
In a footnote to above passage, the court unambiguously wrote: “Because the constitution does not establish primary and subordinate goals, we disagree with the court of appeals’ observation that the unique restriction attached to this goal ‘plainly subordinates the competitiveness goal’ to the other goals.”
In other words, the court found, the constitution requires the commission to make a best-faith effort on competitiveness. If the commission finds what it can do with competitiveness is limited in some way because of its impact on the other goals, then so be it. But that, the court said, doesn’t excuse the commission from trying.
Choosing an Approach
With this clarification in mind, whether and how the new commission will approach its task differently from its predecessor remains to be seen.
The latest geographic information systems simplify the mapping process. Many of the would-be impacts of moving a bloc of census tracts from one legislative district to the next can be determined instantly. Tony Sissons, a “geo-demographer” who has made a career of advising Arizona counties, cities and education boards on redistricting, likens the process to monitoring a series of gauges as one would on a piece of machinery.
For instance, changes that push up a district’s minority proportion could cause the competitiveness gauge to go down. Conversely, a competing set of changes to push up the district’s competitiveness might negatively impact the gauge for compactness.
In approaching the disparity of Republicans over Democrats, the commission will have to decide what it is trying to accomplish. The possibilities include:
The last commission’s method. Create a few districts that look to be ultra-competitive, with virtual parity in the voter registrations of the two parties. To accomplish that, given the overall Republican advantage across the state and the extra Democrats that had to be packed into majority-minority districts to satisfy the Justice Department, the last commission had to load lots of Republicans elsewhere. This presented the GOP with insurmountable voting edges in what turned out to be a near majority – 13 – of the state’s 30 districts.
Its alternative method. James Huntwork, one of the five members of the outgoing commission, failed to convince his colleagues to take a slightly different approach. Instead of making fewer districts very competitive, he wanted to create districts that were marginally less competitive but more of them. These districts wouldn’t have been at parity in voter registration but neither, Huntwork argues, would the differences have been insurmountable.
The Sissons method. Sissons contends that outside of three heavily Republican areas, voter registration in the rest of the state is rather evenly divided between the two parties. He would group the three areas – the suburban areas to the northeast of Phoenix, the East Valley of Phoenix, and the foothills neighborhoods north of Tucson – into six to eight staunchly Republican districts. This would correspond with the six to eight majority-minority districts that are safe for Democrats. The remainder of the districts, he argues, could rather easily be configured to be competitive.
One of, if not the most, pivotal tasks of the new commission will be to choose from among these approaches or to invent one of its own.
–Richard Gilman
