NINE TIMES California voters have been asked to reform the way the state draws its legislative and congressional districts, and nine times they have said no. But Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger seems convinced that the 10th time will be the charm.
It's a tough sell, to be sure. Voters don't seem to realize that there's a connection between how a district is drawn and who gets elected in it. Politicians get it -- and they use their power to redraw political lines to choose their voters and keep their seats.
But a look at the history of the nine failed attempts at reform shows why Schwarzenegger could succeed this time.
In 1930, 1948, 1960 and 1962, organized labor qualified initiatives to overturn rural control of the state Senate. That voters in increasingly urban California favored allowing cow counties to control the upper house of the Legislature illustrates Schwarzenegger's challenge: how to overcome voters' institutional conservatism? They liked the political balance of an urban-based lower house pitted against an upper one controlled by rural interests because they believed it limited the concentration of power in the hands of an urban majority. This system lasted until the California Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in the 1960s.
No sooner had the rural factor in apportionment died than a more appealing one emerged: the ability to gerrymander districts for partisan advantage. Political historians mark the 1951 California redistricting, a Republican plan, as the first partisan map. But Democrats soon mastered the game and, in 1981, enacted one of the most partisan gerrymanders in California history.
Republicans filed a referendum to kill that plan -- and voters rejected it. Then the GOP came up with what it considered a sure-fire way to stop future Democratic gerrymandering: take the power to draw district lines away from the Legislature and give it to a panel of retired judges. In one form or another, Republicans took this idea to the voters four times -- in 1982, 1984 and with competing proposals in 1990 -- and lost every time.
The lessons from this history of reform attempts is clear: Voters are reluctant to choose sides in a partisan squabble that involves an issue they don't completely understand and can see no personal advantage in deciding.
