Newsday (New York)
May 31, 2001 Thursday
SECTION: VIEWPOINTS, Pg. A47

HEADLINE: Redistricting Gives Two Parties Unfair Edge

BYLINE: By Omar Ali and Harry Kresky

Politicians have to take redistricting seriously, because how a district is redrawn to reflect population shifts can determine who wins future elections.

Democratic Rep. Gary Ackerman, whose district includes parts of Queens, Nassau and Suffolk Counties, for instance, is reported to have hired a professional lobbyist in Albany to make sure that his district is not one of the two seats New York State will lose as a result of the census findings. In New Rochelle, a battle is brewing between Democrats and Republicans over how to redraw the districts from which city council members are elected, given the growth of the Latino community. At issue is what partisan impact the creation of a majority Latino district might have in the balance of power between the parties.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently weighed in on such issues in the North Carolina redistricting case of Easley vs. Cromartie. The Court's decision was applauded by Democrats and Republicans alike because it explicitly found that manipulation by the two major parties to achieve partisan ends is acceptable, even if it involves using race as a significant factor in doing so.

The decision represents a major step back from the course taken by the Court after the 1990 census, when the design of a number of new districts was found to illegally discriminate because their odd shapes and demographics made it clear that race was a "predominate" factor in their creation. In Easley vs. Cromartie, the Court found that race was significant, but not predominate, because the goal was to achieve a safe Democratic congressional district in North Carolina.

That it was drawn to include many Democrats who happen to be black voters was not held to cross the constitutional line prohibiting racial discrimination. Indeed, the majority opinion by Justice Stephen Breyer went so far as to state that "the creation of a safe Democratic seat" was a "constitutional political objective." In the dissenting opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that "racial gerrymandering offends the Constitution," and it is "not a defense that the Legislature merely may have drawn the district based on the stereotype that blacks are reliable Democratic voters."

Whether or not one agrees with "the stereotype that blacks are reliable Democratic voters," Thomas' concern about the conflation of party affiliation and race is an important question of democracy and equal treatment under the law. To be sure, there is a general perception of the black community's locked status as the most loyal Democratic Party constituency. Regardless, it does not follow that being black means being a Democrat or that the degree to which any group of voters tends to vote for a political party should be a factor in deciding how their voting district is delimited.

Nonetheless, the Court's latest ruling suggests that the Democratic and Republican Parties can make governmental policy in furtherance of blatantly racialist partisan objectives so long as that policy is couched in race neutral-that is, two-party-terms.

The Court's decision has essentially given legitimacy to a process in which a bipartisan balance may be achieved by allocating more or fewer black voters to districts depending on whether or not the district was designed to be Democratic or Republican. Such a process undermines the electoral power of the black community by assuming that its needs and aspirations coincide with those of the Democratic Party. Making the race of voters the determining factor of how a congressional district is drawn enhances the perception that race and party affiliation go hand-in-hand.

The Court's implicit assumption that the rights and concerns of all voters are protected in a process organized around the creation of safe seats for Democrats and Republicans elected by way of past gerrymandering is not only racist but fundamentally undemocratic. What about the 35 percent to 40 percent of Americans-black, Latino, Asian and white-who identify themselves as political independents? In Bush vs. Gore, the Supreme Court held that government actions cannot "value one person's vote over that of another" without running afoul of the constitutional guarantee of equal protection of the law.

Doesn't a redistricting process that creates a safe Democratic or Republican seat violate the right of equal protection of independent voters? Aren't independents' votes valued less than those of the Democrats or Republicans when the districts in which they vote are rigged for either of the two parties to win? This issue must be addressed.
 

GRAPHIC: Omar Ali, left, is a doctoral candidate in history at Columbia University and a district leader of the Independence Party of New York; Harry Kresky is an attorney in New York City and a member of the State Executive committee of the Independence Party.