Thinking Arizona
Facts to Inform the Public Discourse
New Commission To Set Districts
November 16, 2010
Forty Arizonans will interview for the opportunity to draw the state’s congressional and legislative districts for the next decade.
The procedure for selecting a new Independent Redistricting Commission started Tuesday with a hearing held by the Commission on Appellate Court Appointments. The meeting, coming exactly two weeks after the Nov. 2 election, made for a fast turnaround from reflecting on the results of the last 10-year redistricting cycle to preparing for the next round.
The appointments panel whittled the list of candidates from about 75 applicants (several of the original list dropped out or were disqualified) to the 40 it chose to invite to brief interviews on Dec. 8. It will then narrow the field to a pool of 25 – which must consist of 10 Republicans, 10 Democrats and five independents. From that pool, five new commissioners will be named in a precisely defined process that will be completed by early March.
The process will have a distinctly Maricopa County feel, despite an appeal at the start of the meeting by Steve Lynn, the outgoing chair of the redistricting commission, and special efforts by the appointments commission to give added consideration to those from Pima County and other parts of the state. However, they were working with a list of applicants that was weighted heavily to the state’s biggest county.
What the five appointees will do is all-important. Their work will bear directly on the makeup of the Legislature and Arizona’s congressional delegation. And indirectly, they will influence the degree of participation in the democratic process, ranging from the willingness of citizens to run for office to how many voters turn out on Election Day.
But their task is also something of an unenviable one. The last cycle, beginning in 2001, was the maiden voyage for the citizen-guided method of redistricting that was approved by voter referendum a year earlier. In that first go-round, more than 300 civic-minded souls applied for spots on the new commission, not knowing exactly what lay ahead.
The five who were selected had to work longer and harder than anyone might have anticipated. Lynn told the appointments commission on Tuesday that he put in 3,500 hours of volunteer time on the effort. Their first attempt to draw legislative lines was kicked back by the Justice Department, leading to another round of work, meetings and hearings. Their revisions were challenged in court for much of the decade. Critics still carp about the result.
Thinking Arizona’s review of the election results for the state’s 30 legislative districts, as reported in Edition 1, showed that Republicans enjoyed 13 absolutely safe districts over the course of the decade; the Democrats had 8 equally safe districts. The long odds of overcoming the numerical advantages in those districts discouraged participation. In the just-completed election, repeating a pattern that occurred throughout the decade, the underdog party didn’t bother to field a candidate for eight of the 21 Senate seats, put forward no candidates for the two House seats in six districts and just one House candidate in 13 others.
The remaining nine districts gave both parties at least some chance of winning. In six of those districts, three seats in the Senate and five in the House changed hands on Nov. 2. All the shifts this time around benefited the Republicans.
Whether the incoming commission can achieve more competitiveness remains to be seen. The goal is much easier said than done.
The outlines of the new districts will have to satisfy a variety of competing factors.
They must have equal population, be geographically compact and contiguous, respect communities of interest, use visible geographic boundaries and, most important, comply with the provisions of the U.S. Voting Rights Act that protect the rights of minority voters, while at the same time making as many districts as possible competitive. Fulfilling one goal frequently comes at the expense of another.
The new commission will have to wrestle with three key variables:
√ How many “minority majority” districts must be created to satisfy the Justice Department, and the surplus of minority voters who must be placed in each to assure that minority candidates can be elected. This is a zero-sum game. The more Democrats packed into these districts, the fewer there are left to balance out Republicans elsewhere.
√ How to distribute Republican and Democratic voters in the remaining districts to make as many as possible competitive. The approach taken the last time was to pack large numbers of Republicans into many districts so as to be able to equalize Democrats and Republicans in a few. In those few districts, the gold standard was getting voter registration for the two parties within 3.5 percentage points of each other. Another approach, which was rejected by the last commission over the objections of one of its members, would be to target a somewhat higher differential but apply it to more districts.
√ How the huge growth in independent voters, now comprising nearly one-third of the state, should be factored into the question of competitiveness. The independents have become so plentiful that virtually every district could be considered competitive if a large enough bloc of them could be swayed to swing either way. But of course “a bloc of independents” is an oxymoron.
Lynn suggested to the appointments commission that in selecting the pool of candidates to go on to the next step, it should look for those who work well with others, are not overly partisan in their beliefs, represent the state’s diversity, and are geographically dispersed.
He said the process will have “two strikes against it” if the rest of the state perceives that it is too weighted to Maricopa County. But the appointments commission could only do so much when two-thirds of the applicants were from Phoenix and its environs. See full list of applicants.
Of the 40 selected Tuesday to go on to the next round, 26 are from Maricopa, 11 are from Pima and three are from outlying counties. Of the 14 who are not from Maricopa County, nine are candidates for the Democratic pool. Four are candidates for the Republican pool and one remains in the running for the independent pool.
Those who are expected to be interviewed are:
Democrats (15): Marcia Busching, Robert Cannon, Frances Dickman, Jose Herrera, Michael Kuby, and Kimulet Winzer, all Maricopa; Luis Gonzalez, Linda McNulty, William Roe, Mark Rubin, S.L. “Si” Schorr, and Marshall Worden, all Pima; Eric Henderson, Navajo County; Lawrence Mohrweis, Coconino County; and Jimmie Dee Smith, Yuma County.
Republicans (15): Jim Bruner, Louis de Leon, Scott Freeman, Patrick McWhortor, Michael Perry, Crystal Russell, Mark Schnepf, Leslie Schwalbe, Susan Shultz, Stephen Sossaman and Lynn Werner, all Maricopa; Christopher Gleason, Jeffrey Miller, Richard Stertz and Benny White, all Pima.
Independents (10): Paul Bender, Ray Bladine, Doug Campos-Outcalt, Catherine Castle, Adolfo Echeveste, Kimber Lanning, Timothy Overton, Margarita Silva, Linda Spears, all Maricopa; and Colleen Mathis, Pima.
Several of the choices were provisional based on issues that the appointments commission must sort out with legal counsel. The roles that a few play for certain governmental jurisdictions were questioned. Several candidates did not include the required statement of interest in their applications.
Once the commission narrows the list to 25 on Dec. 8, the Republican and Democratic leaders in both the House and Senate will then take over. Working in a prescribed sequence during January and February, they each will pick a commission member from the pool of 25. Their four selectees will then have 15 days to choose the fifth member, who will serve as chairman of the group, from the pool of five independents.
The commission will be off and running with the results of the 2010 census to be released in March.
– Richard Gilman
