You can count on New Jersey to raise the bar in corrupt politics. This week, Democrats there have crafted a scheme to strengthen their already solid grip on power. They are writing gerrymandering into the state’s constitution. To pass their blatantly undemocratic move, they’re using every trick they can to circumvent opposition.
The current method of drawing districts in New Jersey isn’t perfect, but it’s straightforward enough. Each party chairman picks five people to sit on a redistricting commission. Typically, each party submits a map, and an independent arbitrator, picked by the New Jersey Supreme Court, decides which map most closely matches the state’s constitutional mandate that districts be compact and contiguous and don’t give partisan advantage.
Democrats, despite controlling both the state assembly and state Senate, want even more power.
Their proposal is a constitutional amendment that would grant politicians more control over the process, define “competitiveness” to Democratic advantage, and almost certainly give Democrats even more legislative seats by requiring boundaries to reflect recent statewide elections where Democrats have done better than Republicans.
Under the proposal, party chairmen would each appoint two members, rather than five, to the redistricting commission. The state Senate president, state Senate minority leader, assembly speaker, and assembly minority leader would each nominate two members. The final member and tiebreaker would come from the state Supreme Court.
Changing the makeup of the commission would put politicians more directly in control of drawing districts, yielding a more partisan map that would hand advantage to incumbents and lead to wrangling within parties.
The proposal, however, is much more insidious than that. It adds specific requirements for district composition. Half of all legislative districts would have to tilt Republican and half would tilt Democrat. This sounds fair, but there is duplicity and deviousness in the demand that, in addition, at least a quarter of districts must be “competitive.”
What does “competitive” mean? The measure would define “competitive” to be a district where party composition is within 5 percentage points of statewide votes the past decade.
Because Democrats have done well in the past 10 years and outnumber Republicans statewide by almost 1 million voters, the standard for “competitive” gives them the advantage. The baseline for “competitive” districts will be about 55 percent. That means 25 percent of districts would need to have a partisan breakdown between 50 and 60 percent in favor of Democrats.
In the state Senate, for example, which has a total of 40 seats (currently 25 Democrats), Democrats would set themselves up to start with 20 safe seats and then be able to gain as many as 10 additional “competitive” seats.
The amendment is essentially designed to try to give Democrats a permanent majority, enabling full control of the state government. In fact, an analysis by the Princeton Gerrymandering Project showed that under the measure, Democrats would need just 57 percent of the statewide vote to win 70 percent of seats, and thus a veto-proof majority.
Making matters worse, not only is the amendment undemocratic, but the lawmakers are pushing it through in an undemocratic manner, which is hardly surprising. If you’re keen to undermine democracy in substance, you’re probably OK with trashing it in the process, too.
Normally, to propose a constitutional amendment it takes three-fifths of the state legislature. Democrats, however, have dragged up a rule that allows the amendment to go to voters once it has been passed in two consecutive years. In this case, they plan on calling a vote in December 2018 and just a few weeks later in January 2019 so that it appears on the ballot in November 2019.
They’ve even managed to schedule the hearings on the amendment in the state Senate and assembly for the same time, a deliberate move to limit opponents from speaking out at both hearings.
These efforts to subvert democracy and permanently manipulate New Jersey’s electoral map have long-term consequences. Not only does it undermine fair elections and deny voters of representation, but it also promotes an unhealthy legislative process.
Scrapping the current standard of compactness for this partisan math smashes the idea that representatives are actually representative of a place. It replaces communities of interest with the interests of one party.
Politically, gerrymandering is also increasingly unpopular. In November, voters in Michigan, Colorado, Missouri, and Utah approved ballot measures restricting gerrymandering. Nationwide, more voters oppose gerrymandering than support either political party.
If Democrats truly believe their leadership is a better alternative for voters, they should stand by those ideas and win elections fairly rather than cheating — and there’s a good lesson there for Republicans too.
