THE BIG PROBLEM with Proposition 77, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's ballot measure to create a new system for drawing legislative and congressional boundaries, is that it's much too fair.
Well, there are other flaws too, beginning with the fact that the initiative would require an immediate redistricting, to be completed too hastily using 2000 census data made musty by half a decade of frenetic growth in California.
Still, as a general idea, there is much to be said for transferring reapportionment duties over the long term from the Legislature and the governor to a less partisan forum, in this case a panel of three retired judges.
Drawing the lines of political battle is sometimes said to be more important than the actual voting. And it's certainly true that California has a long history of shameless gerrymandering. Splitting apart cohesive cities, carving up ethnic enclaves or keeping them whole, leaping across waterways or wild lands to bundle together geographically distant clusters of the like-minded -- these are the demographic tools of imposed political dominance. Phil Burton, the legendary Democratic congressman, once concocted a district so bizarrely shaped that he referred to it as "my contribution to modern art." It contained four separate sections, two of which were connected only by water and two by railroad yards.
More recently -- and less creatively -- both major parties colluded to safeguard their own after the 2000 census, redrawing boundaries to protect incumbents in the Legislature and Congress.
In most districts in California nowadays, it really doesn't matter who you vote for in the general election; the registration figures are so lopsided in favor of one party or the other that the winner already has been effectively decided. So, yes, it makes sense in theory to put some distance between the people who write the electoral map and the people who run for office. Allowing working politicians to pick and choose the voters they represent, rather than the other way around, is a particularly blatant form of self-dealing.
Despite that, I'm going to vote against the proposition. In fact, I would vote against any nonpartisan redistricting plan that applies to congressional as well as legislative districts, as Proposition 77 does.
