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Redistricting

Former felon Erica Racz registering to voting

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Surge of interest by would-be citizen mapmakers in California

Surge of interest by would-be citizen mapmakers in California

The 14-person Citizens Redistricting Commission managed California's redistricting for the first time in 2011. Nearly 14,000 people have applied for one of the seats for the post-2020 remapping process.

Citizens Redistricting Commission
Our Staff
By Our StaffAug 06, 2019
Our Staff
The Fulcrum staff.
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So many people want to draw the political boundaries for the nation's biggest state that California's Citizens Redistricting Commission application deadline has been extended.

State Auditor Elaine Howle, who is in charge of an extraordinarily complex process for selecting the 14 "ordinary citizen" commissioners, set a new deadline of Aug. 19 after reporting she's received 13,735 applications in eight weeks — and that the papers are now coming in at a rate of 1,000 a day.

"Many more Californians who are learning more about redistricting and are developing an interest in the opportunity may now want to take advantage of the chance to draw California's congressional and state legislative district lines," she said in announcing the extension.

Whoever is chosen will get to work after the census results are finalized at the end of 2020. They will be charged with putting an emphasis on geographic compactness, keeping communities together and assuring ethnic minorities can get elected. rather than on protecting incumbents or tilting the partisan balance of power.

The process was created by statewide referendum in 2008 and the praise for the first panel, formed for the redistricting of this decade, helped accelerate the movement to combat gerrymandering by getting more states to turn district drawing over to non-politicians.

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The work will be especially closely watched this time because California may not have grown fast enough to keep all 53 of its seats in the House of Representatives — almost one-eighth of the chamber's membership. If the census proves that, it will be the first time in the state's 160-year history that its congressional delegation shrinks, and doing away with one district will be the commission's most visible assignment.

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Jessie Harris (left,) a registered independent, casts a ballot at during South Carolina's Republican primary on Feb. 24.

Joe Lamberti for The Washington Post via Getty Images

Our election system is failing independent voters

Gruber is senior vice president of Open Primaries and co-founder of Let Us Vote.

With the race to Election Day entering the homestretch, the Harris and Trump campaigns are in a full out sprint to reach independent voters, knowing full well that independents have been the deciding vote in every presidential contest since the Obama era. And like clockwork every election season, debates are arising about who independent voters are, whether they matter and even whether they actually exist at all.

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The ballot used in Alaska's 2022 special election.

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The term “ranked-choice voting” is so bandied about these days that it tends to take up all the oxygen in any discussion on better voting methods. The RCV label was created in 2002 by the city of San Francisco. People who want to promote evolution beyond our flawed plurality voting are often excited to jump on the RCV bandwagon.

However, many people, including RCV advocates, are unaware that it is actually an umbrella term, and ranked-choice voting in fact exists in multiple forms. Some people refer to any alternative voting method as RCV — even approval voting and STAR Voting, which don’t rank candidates! This article only discusses voting methods that do rank candidates.

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Make safe states matter

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It’s time for “safe state” voters to be more than nervous spectators and symbolic participants in presidential elections.

The latest poll averages confirm that the 2024 presidential election will again hinge on seven swing states. Just as in 2020, expect more than 95 percent of major party candidate campaign spending and events to focus on these states. Volunteers will travel there, rather than engage with their neighbors in states that will easily go to Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. The decisions of a few thousand swing state voters will dwarf the importance of those of tens of millions of safe-state Americans.

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The democracy movement ignores education races at its peril

Dr. Mascareñaz is a leader in the Cornerstone Project, a co-founder of The Open System Institute and chair of the Colorado Community College System State Board.

One of my clearest, earliest memories of talking about politics with my grandfather, who helped the IRS build its earliest computer systems in the 1960s, was asking him how he was voting. He said, “Everyone wants to make it about up here,” he said as gestured high above his head before pointing to the ground. “But the truth is that it’s all down here.” This was Thomas Mascareñaz’s version of “all politics is local” and, to me, essential guidance for a life of community building.

As a leader in The Cornerstone Project and a co-founder of The Open System Institute I've spent lots of time thinking and working at the intersections of education and civic engagement. I've seen firsthand how the democratic process unfolds at all levels — national, statewide, municipal and, crucially, in our schools. It is from this vantage point that I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, that the democracy reform movement will not succeed unless it acts decisively in the field of education.

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