Drawing the Lines

Q: When is a community not a community?

A: When you are drawing the legislative district lines in New York City.

Elbridge Gerry was an American patriot, who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776. He pledged his life, his fortune and his sacred honor to the cause. Had the Revolution failed, he would have been hanged.

He signed the Articles of Confederation a few years later, but he refused to sign the United States Constitution because it did not, at that time, contain a Bill of Rights, which he considered essential.

However, this great man is remembered today only because as Governor of Massachusetts he signed, in 1812, a bill containing the new district lines for his state legislature, following the census of 1810. The lines were so bent and twisted that a Boston political cartoonist described one of them as resembling the outline of a salamander, and named it a "Gerrymander", after the Governor.

The word "gerrymander" has since become a verb and is the act of drawing legislative lines, no matter how contorted, to favor the political fortunes of the party in power.

Since 1812, over 100 Congresses and several thousand state legislatures have been elected according to lines that were more or less gerrymandered. The world has not come to an end, but the careers of many aspiring politicians have come to an end because of, they claim, the kind of political skullduggery named after Elbridge Gerry.

Today we are about to have new lines drawn for New York State - for the State Assembly, the State Senate, an the New York Congressional delegation. The Constitution of New York gives to the Legislature the task of drawing the district lines, but the Governor has the power to veto the result.

The current Governor, Andrew Cuomo, has said he will veto lines that he considers blatantly political. But he has not boxed himself into a corner with that threat. The judgment will be his.

The three main criteria for drawing the lines are that (1) the districts must be contiguous, (2) each must have approximately the same population and (3) racial and ethnic minorities must not be deprived of the ability to elect one of their own to represent them.

For upstate New Yorkers, a fourth criterion is in effect: the integrity of counties, towns and villages. These subdivisions must not be divided if it can possibly be avoided.

For residents of New York City, no such redistricting criterion exists or is followed for the various communities within the city. Admittedly, New York City's communities are poorly defined. Except perhaps for Queens, the boundary lines of New York City communities are in the eyes of the beholder.

But the communities exist! There is a Harlem. There is a Chinatown. There is a Riverdale, and a Red Hook and a Flatbush. But what are the populations of these communities? The answer depends on who has the pencil for drawing the district lines.

There are more complications. Not all communities are the same size. Some might be 110,000 people, needing 20,000 from some other community to fill out to an Assembly District. Some have a sizable number of Hispanics, a group that is protected under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But many Hispanics may be immigrants, not yet eligible to vote. Communities are constantly in flux, so the lines based on the 2000 census may not be appropriate in 2012.

And here's the irony. The people who understand all these complications best are the elected representatives of these communities, those who make their living knowing and understanding their constituents. They are the ones who, in drawing the lines, can best make the compromises between ethnicity and geography and population size and voting power and all the contradictions that go into making a New York City community.

But, yikes! Aren't these the very people that are likely to commit that foulest of all political deeds - the gerrymander?

Yes, is the answer. They have an interest.

So isn't it better to have a neutral, albeit naive, party draw the lines so we can avoid gerrymandering? No, is the answer. Ignorance is not a virtue.

It would be better (1) to advance noisily the cause of community preservation into the mix of redistricting criteria. This will arouse the interests of community people in the redistricting process. It will put some community heat on the line drawers.

Then (2) the Governor should appoint a select committee to "advise" him as to whether the evil of gerrymandering has rendered the resultant lines worthy of a veto. A palpable fear of a veto might minimize the legislative hanky-panky.

This double barreled solution would be far better than asking a pretend blue-ribbon panel to draw the lines in an unbiased way. If the panel members really know the communities they're dealing with, they'll have biases. They can't help it. How can you be involved in New York City politics and not have biases?

If the panelists really don't know the politics of the communities, how can we ask them to do something as politically important as redistricting? It would be like asking the church lady to referee the Super Bowl game. No biases, just bad calls.

Let the legislature draw the lines, as the Constitution requires. Let the Governor carry his big-stick veto on his shoulder, like a club, as the Constitution gives him the power and duty to do. And let the candidates for office deal with the results as their brains and talents allow – as they have been doing for over 200 years!

All this fretting about gerrymandering is a bit tacky, I think. Elbridge Gerry deserves better of the nation he helped to found.