"the selection process for the California Redistricting Commission was seemingly designed to bar anyone with any expertise"

 

This is obviously is Dr. Kousser's view of things, not the real rules. What the rules did was bar anyone with partisan connections. This included most Sacramento redistricting experts, but not McKaskle, whose redistricting experience was for the State Supreme Court. Here's a case study of what happened in the districts drawn by McKaskle's team in 1991:

 

http://www.claremontmckenna.edu/rose/publications/pdf/rose_ca_case_study.pdf

 

- Doug

 

Douglas Johnson

Fellow

Rose Institute of State and Local Government

Claremont McKenna College

o 909-621-8159

m 310-200-2058

douglas.johnson@cmc.edu

www.RoseReport.org

 

 

 

 

  Although the selection process for the California Redistricting Commission was seemingly designed to bar anyone with any expertise, it failed in at least one respect.  One of the 60 finalists is Paul McKaskle, who was the special master for the CA Supreme Court in the court-drawn redistrictings of the 1970s and the 1990s.  According to my analysis in a 1998 paper, the districts he drew in the 1970s were pro-Democratic, and in the 1990s, pro-Republican, correlating exactly with the partisan composition of the Supreme Court each time.  See http://www.hss.caltech.edu/~kousser/redistricting/Reapportionment%20Wars.pdf
  When I noted McKaskle's presence on the panel of 60, I emailed Dan Walters, the Sacramento Bee columnist, to see why he hadn't done a blog entry on the fact.  Here's his blog in response, which contains more information about McKaskle (and a political slant that I'm skeptical of):

SacBee Capitol Alert Blog
The latest on California politics and government
October 21, 2010
Redistricting commission could have redistricting expert

Some critics of the independent commission that's being formed to redraw districts for state legislators and members of the Board of Equalization have questioned whether it would have enough knowledge of the arcane process to do the job.

The answer may depend on whether Paul McKaskle, one of the 60 finalists for the Citizens Redistricting Commission, survives the remainder of the selection process, which includes peremptory challenges by legislative leaders.

McKaskle, a long-time law professor, was chief counsel to the Supreme Court masters who were appointed after the 1970 and 1990 censuses to redraw legislative and congressional maps after redistricting plans stalled in the Legislature. In both cases, a Republican governor (Ronald Reagan and later Pete Wilson) and a Democratic Legislature were at loggerheads.

One of McKaskle's letters of recommendation, in fact, is from Eugene Lee, a veteran political science professor at UC-Berkeley who was the chief technician in both of those court-ordered redistricting plans.

Together, McKaskle and Lee created districts under which Democrats made major gains in the 1970s and Republicans increased their numbers in the 1990s. While both were subject to partisan carping at the time, redistricting scholars generally have concluded that neither plan was drawn to help either party and the results were largely determined by other factors.

McKaskle, a political independent, also has been a consultant on local government redistricting and has written extensively on the subject. But whether the Legislature's leadership would want to have such a recognized expert on the commission remains uncertain.

Categories: Redistricting


Read more: http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2010/10/redistricting-commission-could.html#ixzz133VtGkG5

Morgan

Prof. of History and Social Science, Caltech
surface mail:  228-77 Caltech, Pasadena, CA 91125-7700
phone 626-395-4080, fax 626-405-9841
home page:  < http://www.hss.caltech.edu/~kousser/Kousser.html>
  . . . without the clarity that makes doubt productive, historians will never be able to fulfill their highest moral responsibility, to build a better world . . .
                      -- from "The New Postmodern Southern Political History"
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                       -- from "The Strange, Ironic Career of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act"