Many Californians have long bemoaned the back-room deals where political honchos drew electoral districts to protect friends and punish enemies, making many districts less competitive that they would otherwise be.
Want to change that? Well, it’s time to step up and sign up.
Any voter who meets some basic qualifications and doesn’t have an obvious conflict of interest can apply to be one of 14 on the first-in-the- nation Citizens Redistricting Commission. That panel will determine the new state Senate, Assembly, and Board of Equalization districts for the next decade after the 2010 census.
If you’re interested, you have more time: State Auditor Elaine Howle, who is in charge of putting together the panel, announced Monday that she is extending the application deadline by four days – to 5 p.m. next Tuesday.
That’s a wise decision.
For one thing, gathering more applications could help dampen one of the criticisms so far – that the current pool of applicants lacks ethnic diversity.
As of Monday, nearly 20,000 voters had applied and nearly 17,000 had been initially ruled eligible. Of those, nearly three-fourths are non-Hispanic whites and nearly 70 percent are men – far higher than their proportions in the general population. On the flip side, Hispanics, Asians, and blacks are nowhere near as numerous in the applicant pool as they are in the population. Latinos, for example, make up 10 percent of applicants, compared with about 37 percent of Californians.
Some advocacy groups fret that if those numbers hold, the commission will not look anything like California, perpetuating the underrepresentation of minorities among voters and elected officials.
Not to worry, says Janis Hirohama, president of the League of Women Voters of California, which supported Proposition 11, the initiative approved in 2008 that called for the commission.
While there’s no diversity requirement for the panel other than political affiliation – five Democrats, five Republicans, and four voters of neither party – Hirohama notes that an applicant’s appreciation for ethnic diversity is emphasized at two different stages in the selection process.
Hirohama also says that the outreach in minority communities – including a $1.3 million public relations effort – “has been taking hold” after a slow start during the holidays. Overall applications for the panel have surged since mid-December from an average of 238 a day to 872 daily since the campaign started on Jan. 28. Partly because of that surge, the state auditor decided to extend the deadline, to take advantage of the momentum.
While the process for picking the commission may not be as tidy as some might hope, it is sure to be more fair and transparent than the gerrymandered ways of the past.
Under this new law, the commission will be in place by next Jan. 1 and will meet in public as it draws new districts by mid-September 2011. For their service, panel members will get $300 a day, plus expenses.
Interested? If so, then go to the panel’s Web site – www. wedrawthelines.ca.gov – to get more information on the qualifications and the application process.