Editorial

Give a strong 'yes' to Proposition 1

Posted

In addition to selecting the candidates of your choice in congressional, State Senate and Assembly, judicial and statewide races for governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and comptroller, voters on Election Day, Nov. 4, will have a chance to reduce the influence politicians have on the decennial district remapping that takes place after every federal census.

This vote may have a more profound and lasting effect on state government than the election of any individual candidate.

Proposition 1, advanced by Citizens Union, a nonpartisan good-government group, calls for significant change in the process of redistricting, the redrawing of Assembly, Senate and congressional district lines.

Currently, incumbent legislators — advised by an allegedly bipartisan committee — decide on the shapes and populations of each district within broad rules. They do so — and this is the problem — in a manner that increases the likelihood of majority-party re-elections by including their supporters in the districts they already control and packing minority-party voters into other districts. These tricks produce more than just weirdly shaped districts that run through, in and around communities and village and county boundaries. They produce and perpetuate an undemocratic, upside-down election process whereby the incumbents — Democrats or Republicans — select who will vote for them. That’s not the way it’s supposed to work.

Specifically, this gerrymandering — the term used to describe the process of creating misshapen districts to serve politicians’ interests — led to a 97 percent re-election rate in New York state in the 2012 election, up from a rate of 94 percent in 2010.

In such unfairly drawn districts, challengers face nearly impossible odds, not because their positions on issues are so unpopular with area constituents, but because the incumbent’s party has been able to select who gets into the ballot booth in that district.

Under those circumstances, few serious challengers arise, and those who do find it difficult to raise campaign funds even from supporters of their own party, who have given the seat up as already lost due to redistricting.

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