[EL] rebuttal to Halberstam article on local redistricting

[Douglas Johnson]

[This is a long rebuttal to the article on creating state entities to
oversee local redistricting distributed to this list. Delete, with my
apologies, for those not interested in this issue.



For those only slightly interested, here is the heart of the objection I
raise:

"[There is] a fundamental flaw in the author's thinking: the author
approaches this issue from a 'redistricting junkie' view, focused on how to,
from a remote location, acquire information, follow, and influence
redistrictings occurring simultaneously in a large number of local
jurisdictions. But that's not the public policy need. The public policy need
is to constructively engage the people who live in a given jurisdiction in
that jurisdiction's redistricting process. A state clearinghouse -- even in
the unlikely event it could be built successfully -- will do nothing for
that resident except siphon off money and time from the process in a
probably-unsuccessful attempt to centralize information in an obscure
website and, eventually, enable state authorities to exert political
control."]



(Disclosure: my firm, National Demographics Corporation, served as
consultant to over 100 local jurisdictions in California and Arizona in the
2011 redistricting cycle, including jurisdictions where redistricting is
directly controlled by the elected officials, where it's controlled by
commissions that lack independence from elected officials, and where it's
controlled by an independent commission.)



For anyone still reading, here are my concerns about the article:



Perhaps this article reflects accurately the state of local redistricting in
New York (about which I know nothing), but its claim to accurately survey
and evaluate local redistricting in California and Arizona is deeply flawed.



Re: Comments on the California State Redistricting Commission



First, its tangential praise of the California state redistricting
commission is questionable:

Procedural transparency is achieved in part by applying California’s open
meeting laws to the selection of commissioners, as well as to the line-‐
drawing process itself. Meetings, hearings, and line-‐drawing sessions are
all open to the public. Video-‐recordings and transcripts of meetings,
public comments and submissions are all posted online and made publicly
available on the CRC’s website. The website itself also includes some
mapping tools (as recommended by the AEI-‐Brookings principles of
transparency) to allow the public to manipulate the data and submit proposed
districts for consideration by the CRC and by the general public. It is
worth noting that public participation was an important goal of the CRC’s
process transparency efforts.



Most of the important line-drawing by the CRC was done in secret, with one
to three commissioners meeting behind closed doors with technical staff to
produce maps for a given area that were then presented and usually accepted
by the full commission. As the other commissioners were also serving on
similar subcommittees for their own regions, there was a strong
institutional pressure encouraging autonomy and deference. Deference to the
secret work of these subcommittees was certainly not universal, but it did
predominate. And the polarized voting study, cited in most of the major
decisions of the Commission, remains secret.



Also, mapping tools were not provided to the public by the Commission. In
fact, when the legislature voted to approve supplemental Commission funding
to provide an online redistricting tool, the Commission specifically voted
to tell the legislature "thanks, but no thanks."



Re: "Free" redistricting GIS software



Second, the article's description of the "free" District Builder program is
false. While the software license is, indeed, free, no data and no local
geography comes with that license, and of course no one to set it up, host
and support is included in the "free" cost. Hosting the system, setting it
up, and creating the database requires expertise and time that costs even
small local governments well into the tens of thousands of dollars (or
more). In contrast, all but the largest of my local clients who wanted
online redistricting options for residents paid only $9,500 for a
soup-to-nuts built, hosted & supported online redistricting solution (not
using District Builder).



Re: Shallow consideration of local redistricting in CA & AZ and questionable
assumptions about influence in local redistricting



More to the central point of the article, the review of local redistricting
shows a shallow review of reality, at least in terms of California and
Arizona.



First, the comment that "Many local jurisdictions cannot afford outside
consultants." This may be the perception if the author only interviewed the
big-dollar state redistricting firms, but shallow in that there are a number
of small firms that focus on local redistricting and often do projects for
less than $10,000. The fact that my firm served over 100 local jurisdictions
in CA and AZ, about half for under $10,000, and that there are at least
three firms that compete with my firm and similarly serve local governments
in these two states alone, shows that this comment is incorrect.



The article's brief return to state issues is similarly simplistic: "purely
self--‐interested redistricting on the part of legislatures seems almost
impossible at the statewide level. There are simply too many structural
hurdles and competing political goals." For the obvious rebuttal, review
California's 2001 redistricting (among many other examples).



Then there is this claim: "Neighborhood groups outside of the very large
cities are unlikely to have much voice in congressional districting because
of their relatively insignificant size." In fact, small cities often elect
Councilmembers in small elections, where a group of 20 activists (and the
50-100 votes they swing) can often change an election. My experience is the
exact opposite of the author's: an active neighborhood group can command
enough votes to overcome virtually any data-driven incumbent advantage an
incumbent's gerrymander might provide, so neighborhood groups that get
involved in local redistricting carry enormous influence.



Regarding the author's frequent complaint about a "lack of data": the author
seems to describe the (undisputed) difficulty for an academic to collect
data from the literally thousands of local jurisdictions in a state. This
has virtually nothing in common with the important question: how hard is it
for a resident to get data from his/her local jurisdiction. In every
jurisdiction I worked with (again, that was over 100 in the 2011 cycle in CA
and AZ), the maps, demographics, options, schedule and process were all
posted on the jurisdiction's website and distributed at every official and
informal forum, making them easily available to any local resident
interested in the process.



Re: Role of GIS data in local redistricting



The author's views are further flawed in the state-centric in the obsession
with GIS data. A majority of local jurisdictions are small enough that GIS
is not needed for constructive public participation in the process (though
it obviously is nice to have). For 30 years our firm has distributed paper
maps and printouts of demographic data, and hundreds of local residents have
used those kits to evaluate proposed plans and to draw and submit their own
redistricting plans (our record is one resident of Glendale Arizona who
submitted 14 proposed plans drawn using only paper, pen, and calculator). In
2005 we supplemented that with an excel spreadsheet available for
excel-savvy residents. When used with the paper maps, this greatly increased
the ease of the work developing a plan. Menifee, California (population: 77,
500) appointed a citizen's committee to draw plans and the committee worked
only with this excel-and-paper combination to come up with its recommended
plan that was then adopted by the Council. GIS is nice (and a number of
local jurisdictions made online redistricting options available to their
clients), but not required to participate effectively in the local
redistricting of the overwhelming majority of jurisdictions.



Then there is this quote: "Experience from California and New York suggest
that once the redistricting process is over a lot of data is lost." This
unsupported quote about California appears to me to be as weak as its
(completely non-existent) supporting evidence.



Re: Proposed Remedy costs a fortune and probably delivers nothing (except
saving time for academics and making millions for the consultant hired by
the state to build the near-useless website)



Then there's the model remedy: states imposing a Voting Rights Act Section 5
preclearance-style process of controlling local redistricting. This is a
political and financial disaster for local governments. As readers of this
list are aware, it is well-established that the preclearance process imposes
expenses on state and local governments ranging from tens of thousands to
hundreds of thousands of dollars. The author urges imposing this approach on
every local government.



Note also that DoJ does not post any proposed plans online. States
implementing the author's recommendation face a never-before-done
requirement to provide GIS support and online data provision to enable
public access to these plans (which, in virtually every case in CA and AZ,
are already available on the local government websites). This is a
multi-million dollar expense for the state. I beg to differ with the
author's claim that "As the successful precedent of Voting Rights Act
preclearance suggests, reporting to a central database (if not a central
authority), and standardizing such reporting, is feasible and can lead to
dramatic improvements in the process." The California Statewide Database,
which provides only *.zip file downloads and no online map development
capabilities, costs millions of dollars to build and support for a decade,
and do not include in that budget any of the outreach advocated by the
author. Furthermore, as was extensively discussed during California
redistricting and highlighted on this list in Justin Levitt's recent
article, the statewide database provides none of the local election or
polarized voting data so crucial to redistricting decision-making.



The following line appears naive but I suspect is consciously avoiding
reality: "the federalism issues that plague Voting Rights Act preclearance
would not arise with regard to state--‐ mandated disclosure of local
redistricting information." This may be literally true (though not
necessarily true for Charter cities, Charter counties and Charter School
Districts in CA & AZ), but it comes across as hiding one's head in the sand
about the financial and political cost, and the battle that comes with
imposing this massive expense and clear political leverage tool over local
government, to say nothing of the multi-million dollar expense imposed on
the state government to set this up.



A realist would also note that California has spent years and millions
unsuccessfully developing a statewide clearinghouse of voter registrations,
which still does not exist. Despite that evidence, the author now expects
the state to build a "Web 2.0" system to collect, use, and distribute all
information about every aspect of hundreds of simultaneous local government
redistricting projects? How is that view anything but absurdly naive?



Then there is a fundamental flaw in the author's logic: "RDCs would promote
process transparency by offering a public communications platform and
website for local jurisdictions to inform participants and other
stakeholders about the timeline, process, and substantive developments of
their redistricting process in standardized formats." This assumes that some
obscure state website location, format, and usage will be well known to the
average neighborhood activist. It is MUCH more likely that a person willing
to get engaged in local government redistricting is already familiar with,
and expecting to access information on, his or her own jurisdiction's
website.



My Conclusion: Author's perspective is fundamentally flawed



This gets to a fundamental flaw in the author's thinking: the author
approaches this issue from a 'redistricting junkie' view, focused on how to
acquire information, follow, and influence redistricting occurring
simultaneously in a large number of local jurisdictions. But that's not the
public policy need. The public policy need is to constructively engage the
people who live in a given jurisdiction in that jurisdiction's redistricting
process. A state clearinghouse -- even in the unlikely event it could be
built successfully -- will do nothing for that individual except siphon off
money and time from the process.



This fundamental flaw is reflected in this absurd statement by the author:
"At least the major local jurisdictions try to publicize such process data
anyhow - except that many jurisdictions do not presently have any logical
place do so. " The jurisdiction's own website is the obvious answer, and it
is where the residents of the jurisdiction will expect to find the
information. From the author's writing it appears that something odd is
happening with government websites (or a lack thereof) in New York (I'm
desperately withholding many funny comments here), but  it is a huge mistake
to attribute that failure to local government nationally.



Re: Who has oversight over local redistricting now in AZ & CA



In California and Arizona, local redistricting is coordinated by counties,
not states. This presents a logistical challenge to researchers, but the
role of government is not to centralize authority simply to make life easier
for academic researchers. In these two states, counties draw precincts,
manage parcel maps (and manage the assignment of parcels to the appropriate
jurisdiction), and manage voter registration rolls and the assignment of
voters to the appropriate jurisdictions. But -- with only one very unusual
exception outside the scope of this discussion -- counties do not have any
authority over local redistricting. Counties have only an implementation
role. And the state has essentially no role in local redistricting.



As the author (and previous authors) illustrate, with redistricting comes
political power. Authority over redistricting means power, and that power
will inevitably be used to achieve political goals. A solution that
centralizes control of local redistricting in state hands will inevitably
lead to state (and partisan) intervention in local redistricting. That's an
absurd solution if the problem is only the academic researcher's difficulty
with collection of data.



- Doug



Douglas Johnson

President

National Demographics Corporation (NDC)

djohnson at NDCresearch.com

m 310-200-2058



(Also, Fellow at the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at
Claremont McKenna College)





From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu
[mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of Rick
Hasen
Sent: Thursday, August 30, 2012 8:22 AM
To: law-election at UCI.edu
Subject: [EL] ELB News and Commentary 8/30/12




“Process Failure and Transparency Reform in Local Redistricting: Harnessing
the Power of 21st-Century Technologies to Fix 19th-Century Democracies”
<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=39317>


Posted on  <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=39317> August 29, 2012 11:35 am by
Rick Hasen <http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Michael Halberstam has posted this draft
<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2103841>  on SSRN
(forthcoming, Election Law Journal). Here is the abstract:

Redistricting reform during this cycle has pushed for greater transparency
in redistricting, more public participation, the removal of redistricting
from the hands of legislatures, and the design of more legitimate
redistricting institutions and decision procedures. Reform efforts, however,
are generally focused on statewide and congressional redistricting.
Meanwhile, little, if anything, is being done to reform or study thousands
of local redistrictings across the country, which typically take place under
the radar. Local redistricting processes, moreover, vary between
jurisdictions and levels of government, take place in institutional contexts
that differ from statewide redistricting, are subject to different political
dynamics, and are more vulnerable to serious process failures than statewide
redistricting. This article advances a policy proposal to reform local
redistricting that weds aspects from several contemporary governance
approaches - including so-called ‘third-generation transparency” methods.
The article suggests that sates establish centralized statewide
redistricting clearinghouses for local redistricting (RDCs) that would
standardize and systematize the disclosure of redistricting data and process
information across the whole range of jurisdictions within a state. It sets
forth the proposed design of such RDCs in some detail upon a careful
dissection of the concrete information requirements of the different
governmental and nongovernmental actors at each stage of the redistricting
process; and of the institutional and political dynamics of local processes.
The proposal envisions adapting new technologies to address process
failures, but leaving existing local institutional arrangements in place.

Apart from its specific intervention in the national debate about
redistricting reform, this article can also be read as a contribution to the
broader literature about new governance approaches, and more specifically,
as a case study on how certain mechanisms of “targeted transparency” or
“choice architecture” can be applied to regulating the democratic
political process.

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