Monday, September 15, 2014

ELECTION DISTRICTS: PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE



Election day approaches and lists are being drawn of key districts to watch.



The Herald-Leader focuses on 8 districts whose outcome could change who controls the Kentucky House. 5 of the 8 have had their district lines redrawn.

Cn/2 politics focuses on 10..and 5 of these have had their lines redrawn.

In both cases, the Democrats who control the House redrew lines for their advantage. (Had the GOP been in control, based on past history in almost every state, they would have redrawn lines to favor themselves.)

This is NOT the way government should be run.  Some states, 16 I think, have been smart enough to shift the responsibility for redrawing district lines after each census to a bi-partisan group (if not non-partisan.) In most cases it’s an independent commission composed of  specialists in population studies, geography, political science—often from state universities—as well as officials of both parties. Sometimes the legislatures can overturn those lines..by a super majority..and recourse can be had to the courts.

Kentucky needs to adopt such a system..and soon..long before the next census is held and this gerrymandering begins again. The presents lines were delayed this cycle because the first set of lines didn’t pass muster in the courts.

And it’s not just the states. The “gridlock” of Washington can fairly be traced to a GOP strategy  (not that the Dems would have been  different) of gerrymandering Southern states (especially Texas where the top GOP official responsible was convicted of violating the law and N.C. where new district lines were only as wide as the interstate highway they followed, and key state Florida, where the lines got redone just weeks before their most recent election.)

Not a way to run a railroad..or a nation that prides itself on democracy.  This is  not democracy. Only such minor issues  as war and taxes and health care, and new highways, small stuff like that, hangs on those votes.

I hope the presidents of UK and UL, which have faculties that study this situation, may become “pro-active”  (and pro-democracy) and suggest a way out of Kentucky’s current mess..it’s long, long overdue.

I'm just sayin'...

1 comment:

  1. The United States of America is not a Democracy, thank God we are a Constitutional Representative Federal Republic, there is no such thing as a 'non-partisan panel', some of these so-called non-partisan panels have been some of the greatest gerrymanderers - for example in California and in Arizona, the district in North Carolina you're talking about was only created due to the unconstitutional Voting Rights Act mandating federal oversight of districts in the South, mandating black and hispanic majority districts, rather than local region districts.
    Other 'non-partisan', or 'bi-partisan' redistricting efforts are just as wrong, taking the idea that it is their goal to create 'fair-fight', or moderate districts which favor neither party, the political leaning of the districts in question should have no import on how they are drawn, these Representatives are meant to represent the needs of a region, whether that area has issues for soybean farming, irrigation, immigration, alligator fishing, university education, etc. That area is meant to be represented, not these racist federal democrat-mandated groups, Lyndon Johnson knew that blacks supported democrats by 90%+ margins, therefore the Voting Rights Act was designed to carve, in effect, at-large extremely safe, extremely liberal seats from states and areas where he could not expect any seats to be so.

    Yours is a popular view, but it is not an accurate view, liberals are packed into very small left-wing districts because they live in small, urban, left-wing areas, geography is the modern liberals enemy in house districts
    And I'm just sayin'

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