One of our local NPR affiliates ran fascinating interview with the director of Common Cause New York, Rachel Leon. With the nation's most dysfunctional legislature and rigged electoral laws, New Yorkers rely on Common Cause and other good government groups to speak out for the interests of citizens.
Leon spoke primarily about how to reform New York's obviously broken political system. The first step is redistricting reform.
I've always considered electoral reform to be the most important reform to impose on this state's government. Progressives tend to focus on other 'sexy' causes like universal health care or instant runoff voting. And while those causes are important, redistricting reform is the most fundamental.
Simply put, such reform is a PRE-CONDITION for the advancement of any progressive causes.
Right now, citizens have almost no impact on Albany. Everything in the legislature is controlled by the leaders of the two chambers, with plenty of input from lobbyists.
Redistricting reform would change the fundamental equation.
Right now, legislators choose their voters long before voters get to choose their legislators. Legalized gerrymandering ensures that the vast majority of legislative districts are either overwhelmingly Democratic or overwhelmingly Republican.
There has been an implicit agreement between the Republican Senate majority leader and the Democrat Assembly Speaker to agree to legislative districts that helps preserve the majority of each. Each leader has foresaken their co-party members in the other chamber to preserve their own power.
This is why the Republicans have controlled the Senate since the late 60s (despite the state's voter registration being overwhelmingly Democrat) and the governor's chair for the last dozen years, but haven't come close to controlling the Assembly in a quarter century.
This gerrymandering effectively makes incumbents virtually unaccountable, as most are representing districts whose registrations are overwhelmingly of their own party. Most incumbents get weak opponents. A disturbing number don't get any opponents at all.
To wit, there are 62 members of the state Senate. In the 2004 elections, 4 incumbents lost their re-election race. This was considered a virtual revolution in New York politics.
It's commonly known that most legalized gerrymandering is done by drawing odd shaped, sprawling districts to ensure overwhelming majorities for one party and sometimes even to exclude a potential strong challenger to an incumbent. Director Leon also noted a different way upstate districts get gerrymandered. She pointed out that districts include the prison population in the census counting. There is a very large prison population in many upstate counties. Prisoners, of course, can't vote. This doesn't necessarily affect the partisan makeup of the districts but it certainly makes a mockery out of one man, one vote. (For some reason, all I could think of when she talked about this was the three-fifths compromise).
Legalized gerrymandering is choking off what's left of democracy in New York state.
The solution is fairly straight forward: an independent re-districting committee. Other states like Iowa and Arizona choose a panel of retired judges to re-draw the lines. This panel can be chosen with input from the governor, from the legislative leaders, even from the secretary of state or attorney general.
The panel would submit the proposed new district lines to the legislature. But they would be compelled to either accept or reject the panel's plans. Legislators could not amend them.
While not without potential flaws, this would certainly be a great improvement over the current system of legislators choosing their voters. It would take the power out of basically two men (Assembly speaker and Senate majority leader) and give it to a panel of hopefully disinterested former judges.
The plan's biggest virtue is, of course, its greatest challenge. Because the plan takes imperial power away from the speaker and the majority leader, it makes it very difficult to persuade those two men to give up that power. And since lack of legislative accountability is an integral part of the system, it's very hard to exert any pressure on those two men or even on their co-party members who selected them. Thus, you have a catch-22.
Fortunately, good government groups and, yes, newspaper editorialists are around to prevent the issue of reform from dying.
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