Will lawmakers ever tame the mighty gerrymander dragon?

Editorial by the Fayetteville Observer, reprinted by The Jacksonville Daily News, March 8, 2017.

The original gerrymander would look familiar to North Carolina lawmakers, and to many of this state’s voters.

The word was coined in 1812 when Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry signed a bill that created new state senate districts in ways that benefited his Democratic-Republican Party. One of the new districts took on a bizarre curved shape, arcing from the suburbs just north of Boston all the way up to the New Hampshire line. A Boston newspaper cartoonist turned it into a dragonlike creature and named it a Gerry-mander — a conjoining of the governor’s name with a salamander.

It turned into the governor’s ticket to inglorious immortality, the word that’s been used ever since to describe outrageously shaped legislative districts created to benefit the party in power. Politicians today, aided by high-priced consultants and sophisticated computer mapping programs, are better than ever at the gerrymandering art. They’re so good that some boast that if voting records show a husband is Republican and his wife is a Democrat, they can draw the electoral district line across the middle of their bed.

North Carolina has some General Assembly and congressional districts that Elbridge Gerry would admire. The state also has a growing number of residents outraged by the cynical manipulation of district boundaries and politicians who profess the same dissatisfaction.

Trouble is, it’s always the party that’s out of power that supports the switch to a nonpartisan redistricting process. Many of the Republicans now in top leadership positions in Raleigh were fervent advocates of redistricting reform a few years ago — when Republicans were in the minority. But since they took the majority, reform doesn’t interest them. Likewise, Democrats who long resisted reform are now its greatest champions.

But voter outrage does eventually get telegraphed to the majority in the State Legislative Building. A recently filed bill with bipartisan sponsorship would create a nonpartisan redistricting commission that would supervise legislative staff as it draws North Carolina’s 13 congressional districts and the 170 districts in the state House and Senate. Political office-holders and their relatives would be barred from the five-member commission, which would be led by the chairman of the State Board of Elections.

There is, of course, a gerrymander-shaped fly in the ointment: The General Assembly would retain the final say in accepting or rejecting the new voting maps. Still, this system could open the door to further redistricting reform and would likely return better results than we’re getting now from the exercise in political power that follows every federal census.

The lead sponsor of the bill, state Rep. Chuck McGrady — a Henderson Republican — said this week that, “When we were in the minority, this was a bill that Republicans generally rallied around. If it was the right thing then, it is still the right thing now.”

He’s right. But will a majority from his party agree? We’ll see. We wouldn’t be all that surprised if Gov. Gerry’s 205-year-old monster is with us a while longer.

— Fayetteville Observer

http://www.jdnews.com/opinion/20170308/editorial-will-lawmakers-ever-tame-mighty-gerrymander-dragon