Martin Dyckman: Florida should adopt an independent redistricting commission

The corpus delicti lay in plain view. The circumstantial evidence was obvious. Everyone knew who did it. The courts, though, couldn’t act without proof the offense was deliberate.

That’s not about a crime in the usual sense. Rather, it describes why it’s taking so long to replace the Legislature’s gerrymandered voting districts with maps that respect the public’s right to fair representation.

It was plain to see, three years ago, that the 27 congressional districts and 40 Florida Senate seats were drawn to protect, if not pad, the Republican Party’s outsized majorities in Tallahassee and Washington.

A team of political scientists and allied experts compared the maps and the 2012 election results to what ought to have been expected from the “Fair Districts” initiatives that voters had imposed on their arrogant Legislature two years before.

They reported the results in a book, “Jigsaw Puzzle Politics in the Sunshine State,” published in the spring by the University Press of Florida. (Disclosure: the Press also published my three books.)

They concluded – as, eventually, the courts did – that the House had made reasonable efforts to comply.

But the congressional plan bore obvious earmarks of “a lack of wholehearted compliance with the Fair Districts reform.”

So did the Senate plan.

Districts weren’t as compact as they could have been. Relatively few incumbents were forced to run against each other. There was a significant shortage of real competition.

But two elections have gone by under these unconstitutionally rigged systems because the citizens fighting them had to prove to the courts that the outcomes were not just coincidental; that there had been a deliberate scheme to flout the rules.

The congressional map still awaits a final revision by the state Supreme Court. The Senate map, following what amounted to a guilty plea by its makers, is to be redrawn by a trial judge after the House and Senate came to a snarling impasse over how to do it themselves.

Folks, this is not how it’s supposed to work.

In 2010, the voters of Florida set off a clatter of teeth-gnashing in the Legislature by approving the two “Fair Districts” initiatives that prohibit redistricting “with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent …”

Those applied for the first time to the 2012 redistricting. The proof of bad intent had not been flushed out when two of the scholars wrote of the congressional map, “Based on the pattern of public submissions, and on contextual information, we suspect the adopted plan was drawn for partisan motivations,”

The litigation confirmed their suspicion. Republican consultants fought all the way to the Supreme Court to conceal the “trade secrets” that furnished the proof. The Legislature had used the consultants to conceal deliberate gerrymandering. Among other things, there were shrewdly rigged congressional maps passed off as suggestions from private citizens. Subsequently, in separate legislation, the Senate conceded that its own districts were in violation too.

The 5-2 decision to unveil the “trade secrets” in the public’s favor came with an ominous cloud: the dissent by the two most conservative of the three Republican governor’s appointees on the Supreme Court. They dissented also to the ultimate judgment that the entire congressional scheme was flawed.

Four new justices to be recommended by Rick Scott’s nominating commission will be seated before the 2022 redistricting. Will the court’s first crackdown on gerrymandering also be its last?

The coalition that passed the Fair Districts initiatives needs to mobilize again. One objective should be an independent redistricting commission. Another should be to dispose of “intent” as the measure of legality. It’s the results that should matter, and when fully a third of all legislators escape the next election without any major party opposition, as happened in Florida last year, that result speaks for itself: Florida voters are being robbed of their right to fair representation.

If someone is killed by a drunken driver, it doesn’t matter that the death was unintentional. The circumstances alone require a conviction.

Arizona’s independent commission, the product of a voter initiative that the politicians fought bitterly up to the Supreme Court, is required to draw districts that are as competitive as possible. If that standard were brought to Florida, the entire Legislature would have to be reinvented.

Earlier this month, Ohio voters resoundingly approved a ballot amendment to restructure that state’s ineffective Apportionment Board and tighten the standards to resemble those that enabled – or should we say forced? – the Florida Supreme Court to finally act on the public’s behalf instead of the Legislature’s.

According to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of law:

“The Commission is also required to try to draw districts so the number of seats each party is likely to win mirrors its share of the statewide vote.”

In other words, intent no longer matters. The statistical results will speak for themselves.

Were that to become the rule in Florida, neither party could monopolize the Legislature.

Some Florida Republicans are being particularly obnoxious about having been caught red-handed. They’re bad-mouthing Common Cause and the League of Women Voters for their leadership roles in the litigation.

What they forget or ignore is how the League and Common Cause took their side when it was the Republicans who were the minority and the victims of Democratic gerrymandering back in the 1970s and 1980s. The organizations supported the Republicans in a call for amending the Constitution to create an independent redistricting commission. My newspaper, and I believe some others, even printed their initiative petitions for voters to clip, sign, and mail in.

It’s as necessary a reform now as it was then. All that has changed is the name of the party that’s abusing power.

    Martin Dyckman is a retired associate editor of the newspaper formerly known as the St. Petersburg Times. He lives near Asheville, North Carolina. Column courtesy of Context Florida.