Establishing a Vision for Nonpartisan and Fair Redistricting

The power to draw lines—the lines defining legislative districts—has turned out to be one of the most consequential in any democracy, particularly in the United States, where our distinct racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and rural/urban divides often track political ideology. Since 2010, when a partisan wave locked in Republican control in 23 states, we’ve seen the consequences of redistricting largely in partisan terms. For example, in elections for the state legislature in Wisconsin in 2018, Democrats won 54 percent of the total vote, but Republicans gained control of 63 of 99 seats. But there’s more to redistricting than partisan control. Often, politicians draw lines to protect incumbents of both parties, to punish or make reelection difficult for outspoken or independent-minded officials, or to prevent a particular community from gaining voice in government.

As access to sophisticated mapping tools and the expertise to use them expands, politicians have ever more power to, as the saying goes, choose their voters rather than the have the voters choose them. And that extends to the local and municipal level, where decisions made by governments often have the most immediate, direct impact on individuals, families, and communities, and where recent immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and the historically disenfranchised struggle to be heard. By bringing solutions that enable fair districting, such as independent redistricting commissions, to the local level, we can help give voice to those struggling to be heard in the halls of local power.

New America CA fellow Nicolas Heidorn has been a pioneer in thinking about, advocating for, and helping to implement fair and independent redistricting at the local level in California. I spoke with Nicolas about his work and his vision for establishing nonpartisan and fair redistricting—not from the top down but from the ground up.

—Mark Schmitt, Director, Political Reform Program, New America

You're working on a particular area that, before you came on board, I hadn't heard that much activity about: redistricting, which is high profile. But you've been looking at the local level as much as at the state level. Can you talk about how you came to think of that area?

That’s a great observation because redistricting, which has really risen in prominence in the past few years, is often thought of as a state or a congressional issue. But really, redistricting has to happen wherever election districts are used. So that means from Congress all the way down to city council. And while redistricting is an important process for making sure that all election districts of the same populations have the same level of representation in government, it can be abused. So, unfortunately, the same partisan racial and pro-incumbent gerrymandering that we see at the state and congressional level also happens at the local level—it just doesn’t get the same level of media attention.

I personally came to this issue in my hometown of Sacramento, where I found out that, even though we have an eight-member city council, we don't have any Latino representation on our council. And it was explained to me by leaders of the Latino community that that's because their community had been split. It had allegedly been fractured intentionally in the redistricting process into three different districts. It really goes to show how that process of redistricting can have huge outcomes on representation and huge outcomes on accountability. The goal of my project is to address that issue, and really dig into the local level to ensure that we do have fair representation at all levels of government.

Has anything changed in Sacramento?

Yes. In fact, in Sacramento, the League of Women Voters, Common Cause, and LULAC [the League of United Latin American Citizens] partnered to create the Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission. The California Local Redistricting Project assisted them with identifying best practices and drafting, and that proposal was brought to the city council, put before the voters, and enacted. So going forward in Sacramento, starting after the 2020 census, the new lines will be drawn with the help of a citizen's commission. That's become a huge focus point of our project: looking at the practices and processes that can make for a fairer, more inclusive, and more representative redistricting process. Often that ends up focusing on the issue of who's drawing the lines.

My general sense is that the larger municipalities in California—outside maybe Fresno and a few others—are pretty largely one-party municipalities. Is this phenomenon—the partisan districting—a big part of what you encounter?

The partisan gerrymandering at the local level in California tends to happen at the county level. And the county is obviously much bigger, and it will include urban areas that may be strongly Democratic but then also rural areas that may be strongly Republican. And so that's where you see much more opportunity for cracking voters based on their party affiliation—in other words, traditional partisan gerrymandering. But what's interesting is that, even within big municipalities that may be single-party, it seems to be human nature that people break off into factions, with a more liberal faction, for example, and a more moderate faction, even in San Francisco. And you see redistricting used as a tool to try to give an advantage to one side of that divide or the other.

Where you have sort of de facto parties in a one-party city.

Exactly.

Are there other ways of involving citizens in the process of drawing the lines, beyond those who were chosen as members of the commission?

Absolutely. That's actually one of the biggest benefits of the commission process: It creates more opportunities for public engagement. A commission is a single-issue body focusing just on redistricting; it'd be fairly typical for a city commission to hold something like 10 public hearings. Generally what we've seen is they'll hold them in different areas of the city to get feedback from different neighborhoods at different times of the day, including after business hours and maybe on weekends, to allow more people to participate. The city of Chula Vista, for example, I think held something like a dozen public hearings and received several hundred public comments and a few dozen draft maps from citizens. This had a huge impact on its process of deciding how [the city] wanted to draw the maps.

What's so important about public participation, particularly in redistricting, is that defining what communities should be kept together for redistricting is fundamentally a process we need the public to weigh in on, to say, This is what my community is, and here's what we consider our neighborhood to be, because those aren't always lines you can find just by looking at a book.

And that's a phenomenon that may be harder to do at the state level, where you look at state-led state assembly or state Senate districts that are generally bigger than a neighborhood. But at the local level, you can trust people to kind of know what their community is.

One of the things we're interested in here [with Political Reform], and my colleague Lee Drutman has written a lot about in particular, is the potential for expanded use of multi-member districts—and things like that— accompanied by ranked-choice voting. Do you have localities that have gone beyond the single-member district maps? Is that part of your agenda?

We focus solely on redistricting, and in California no jurisdiction has gone to multimember districts. So it hasn't really been something that we've looked at. Although if you were to have a jurisdiction go to multimember districts, I do think it would still be important that the district lines be drawn fairly. So this would still be a case where we would probably suggest having a commission to draw those larger multimember districts.

And how does what you're doing relate to other political reform priorities, particularly in California, or to the work of Common Cause California, which I know you're connected with?

We've seen a lot of emphasis on trying to ensure that we have election systems that are representative and accountable, and that inspire trust. And so with the attention to gerrymandering particularly, and when people don't see their votes translating into outcomes, that can have a disenfranchising effect, especially if there's a sense that the system has been rigged to disenfranchise some voters. So redistricting is an important component of trying to address all three of those issues. To have fair representation, you need lines that actually represent organic communities. To have accountability when people vote in ways that their electorate doesn't like, you need those communities united so that they can effectively have their votes translate into outcomes. And on the trust issue, by moving it to an independent commission. That's one where we're saying we're not going to allow incumbents who have a conflict of interest in how the lines are drawn to continue to control that process.

What kind of people tend to be on commissions?

It's open to everyone, but a traditional profile would often be community leaders who have done a lot in particular neighborhoods. It can really be almost anyone from that perspective. A lot of emphasis is often placed on who shouldn't be on commissions. So excluding people who are closely affiliated with incumbents or closely affiliated with political parties or who are major donors. Trying to exclude people who might have an interest in not approaching this with the goal that should be on the commission's mind, which is trying to ensure fair representation within a community.

And do you do any of that within a statute?

Typical restrictions would be no elected officials or family members of elected officials, no recent candidates for office, no major donors, and no city lobbyists. Those types of restrictions would be put in place. You'll often have criteria saying commissioners should be selected for their knowledge of the jurisdiction, their ability to be impartial, their ability to work collegially with others, and for demonstrating that they've been civically active in the community.

Who generally selects the members of the commission?

It really varies a lot. In California, we have 13 independent commissions. In some commissions, incumbents do get to select the commissioners as long as they meet the criteria to be appointed. But the modern trend among local commissions is to either have a nonpartisan body doing the appointing—for example, have retired judges appoint the commissioners—or to use random selection to again pull it away from any possible influence by incumbents. Under that model, you'd create a pool of qualified applicants, a certain subset would be randomly selected, and then many of them then have the initial randomly selected commissioners self-select the final handful of commissioners to round out the body and also ensure that the body as a whole is diverse.

How many [commissions] were there five years ago? How many were there 10 years ago? Is this a relatively new story?

This is almost entirely new. Prior to 2008, there were only two commissions. After California created the state commission in 2008, what you saw was a wave of local governments starting to pick up commissions, too. I think in the state of California, the state commission model showed local governments that there is a solution out there that they probably haven't thought of before. In terms of recent growth, about six new commissions have been created in just the past four years. So we're seeing very rapid growth, especially as the census approaches.

What's interesting about that to me is that we often talk about reform as something that bubbles upward—we say that innovations in states might lead to national change, and that innovations in localities might lead to statewide action. But it sounds like you're describing something that's almost the opposite, as the state took it up and created a movement to do more at the at the local level.

It's very interesting. It's actually showing that these models can go in both directions. Prior to the state commission being created, you had models in San Francisco and San Diego showing that the independent commission model could work and could be a fairer process. And that was part of the inspiration for the state commission. Then, with the passage of the state commission, it helped push it down to even more local jurisdictions. It's an interesting information exchange that seems to go in both directions.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.