(ominous music)
- [Woman's Voice] We live in a
society where the people fear
the government when the
government should fear its people.
- People might not say: I'm mad
and gerrymandering is the reason.
Or: I'm mad and we need
redistricting reform.
But the things they tend to be mad at
are things that gerrymandering produces.
- [Protesters] Build a worker's party!
- I think it's done
more damage to democracy
in this country than anything else.
Not even a close call.
- United we fight, divided we fall!
United we fight, divided we fall!
United we fight!
- The government is there
to represent the people,
not the representatives picking the people
that they want to vote for them.
We don't want a rigged
system; this is America.
And more importantly, it's Virginia.
(dramatic music)
- [Voice On Radio] Many
states are now reforming their
congressional districts as
a result of the 1960 census.
And inevitably, this leads
to charges of gerrymandering,
directed at both parties.
- [Man's Voice] Well, it's
still, even if you could pass
those proposals, you could
still have a good deal
of gerrymandering.
- [Man's Voice] With a 98
percent rate of re-election,
a seat in Congress is one of the most
secure jobs in America.
(pensive music)
- We'd had in Virginia,
ever since about 1851,
middle of the 19th century,
the rule that congressional
districts had to be
contiguous and compact.
You can sort of imagine a
district that is compact,
and contiguous, as opposed
to those, the districts
we actually have, most of the time,
that look like Rorschach tests.
They're splattered all over the map.
Clearly not contiguous or compact.
(uptempo music)
- Okay, our first district
is Maryland's third district.
So I want you to look at this and tell me
any image that comes to mind, okay?
So what do you see?
- Like, a face?
With eyes and a nose.
- The next one is Virginia's
20th Senate district.
- Oh, I don't know.
It's just kind of like all over the place.
You know what?
It kind of looks like
the Loch Ness monster.
- What do you see?
- Wow.
That one looks like a,
kind of like a snake
that's been, ah, run over by a car.
- [Woman's Voice] A lion?
- That's an obese lion.
It's okay, I mean, this is
the world we live in now.
- [Woman's Voice] Yeah,
because there's his feet.
There's two feet.
- [Host] Tiny feet.
- I guess maybe those are the other two,
and he's got a, ah...
- Hm, let's go to the next one.
- Okay! (laughing)
- Oh, it's like, ah,
an evil guy, laughing?
- [Host] An evil guy?
- [Man's Voice] And a city.
- The humps, and then like, you know,
that's his head, sticking out.
- I see that.
- I can't believe that's a district.
- Like, the teeth are
like this, right here.
And it's just like: (laughing)
- He's maniacally laughing
at what appears to be a,
if I may, a crumbling cityscape.
- Like, a dragon on its back,
like, floating in a pool or something.
It's got its legs up in the air.
- It's just relaxing.
He's not looking to breathe
fire and destroy castles.
- No, he's not on the clock.
- Ah, this next one is Virginia's eighth
congressional district,
in norther Virginia.
- Oh.
Like a, a dancing man?
He's like, standing on his tippy-toes,
and he's sort of thrusting his arms out,
and his head's tilted forward.
It's Michael Jackson.
- So Virginia's eighth reminds
you of the King of Pop?
- Absolutely.
- [Narrator] So, what
exactly is gerrymandering?
Simply put, gerrymandering
is the manipulation
of district lines to
determine which voters
are in the district, the
outcome of an election,
or even if there will be an election
in which we have a choice.
How does this happen?
We better start at the beginning.
Every 10 years, the US
Constitution mandates
that every resident of the
United States be counted
in the Census; a questionnaire
is sent to every household
in America, and is due to be returned
to the US Census Bureau on
Census Day, April first.
Yes, April first.
The data collected
ultimately determines how
and where representation is distributed
within the House of Representatives
and state legislatures.
And the process by which
these district lines are drawn
is called: redistricting.
Now, here's where it gets tricky.
How those lines are actually
drawn every 10 years
is left to the discretion
of state legislatures.
Or more specifically, the
legislators whose party
happens to be in power at
the time of the census.
Since these legislators are politicians,
who will face elections
every two or four years,
district boundaries can
be critical in deciding
which voters are within the boundaries,
whether he or she will have an opponent,
whether it will be a competitive race,
even whether the outcome of
an election will be in doubt.
As you might imagine,
this process lends itself
to district lines being manipulated
by the politicians drawing them,
giving an advantage to the party in power,
favoring one political party over another.
The term gerrymandering
dates back to 1812,
when Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry
signed a bill that allowed
districts to be drawn
to favor his political party,
the Democratic Republican party.
Yes, it no longer exists.
The lines drawn were so contorted that one
of the districts was believed
to resemble a salamander.
A cartoon highlighting the new map
and the South Essex Salamander District,
ran in the Boston Gazette
in 1812, with the headline:
the Gerry-Mander, a
new species of monster.
But while government
Gerry may get the credit,
some scholars believe
government Patrick Henry
of Virginia was the first to
use political redistricting.
In 1788, he attempted to
fix an election for Congress
by creating a district
to force future president
James Madison to face James Monroe,
another future president.
- In my mind, it should
be Henry-mandering.
It shouldn't be gerrymandering,
because the first efforts to
essentially draw somebody out
of their district was
done by Patrick Henry.
- I believe I have found an answer
to our problem with Mr. Madison.
Mr. Madison and I have our differences.
He, as you know, is a Federalist.
Just what we need, a
strong central government.
We've only recently freed ourselves
from a strong central government.
I, however, have a plan
that should be able
to thwart Madison and
his Federalist allies.
All we have to do is draw the lines
so that Madison's home,
Montpelier, is in the same
district number five as
that of James Monroe.
I believe we can say with some confidence,
that Mr. James Madison
will not stand a chance,
against James Monroe. (cackling)
- Virginia is the home of
the original, you know,
effort to draw somebody
out of their district
for political purposes, to
choose voters, if you will,
in the history of this country.
Like many things that
Massachusetts tries to claim
it was first in, and Virginia really was,
this is one of them, also.
- [Narrator] Actually, that plan failed.
James Madison was elected anyway,
and governor Henry avoided
going down in history
with the indignity of Henry-mandering.
24 years later, when Madison was elected
to his second term as president,
his vice president was: Elbridge Gerry.
Go figure.
- Legislators now pick their voters,
rather than voters pick their legislator.
It really happens.
You see, if you take set of precincts,
if you draw them north/south,
it might have an outcome
that's historically predictable
that the Democrats would win.
But if you draw the district
east/west, it may have
an outcome of Republican controlling it.
And guess what?
The way this works, of
course, is by human nature
of the people in office,
they wanna stay in office,
they want power, so
they draw that district
in the direction that would
serve their interest most.
- 12 localities in that
one district that I could
actually get in my car
and drive from my driveway
to the White House from Portsmouth,
in about the same amount
of time as it took me
to get to the end of the district
in Halifax and South of Boston.
Bumped right up to Martinsville
and Pennsylvania Counties.
- We're certainly seeing,
in state after state,
whether it's Illinois
or Michigan or Indiana
or Delaware, or Virginia,
that there are a surprising
number of voters, oftentimes in polls,
it's a high majority of
70 or 80 percent of voters
who instinctively get that redistricting
should not be drawn,
lines should not be drawn
by legislators, themselves,
because it leads to a
fundamentally broken system.
- But I do think it's very
difficult for us to try
to draw these lines.
There isn't any doubt they're
unsatisfactorily drawn.
Not only for the Congress,
which is not the worst offender,
but the state legislatures,
where we have very, ah,
and have had for many
years, notorious examples
of gerrymandering, but
here's a responsibility
for the states, not
the federal government.
- Even the body that the
framers of our constitution
intended to be the most
vulnerable to shifts
in public attitudes, the
House of Representatives,
has with a combination of gerrymandering,
changes in campaign finance rules,
and the powers of incumbency,
become a virtually
permanent chamber, no longer
truly responsive to the people.
- No single factor is more basic
to restoring competitive elections,
than ensuring fair redistricting.
I propose a new criteria
for redistricting,
without favor to party,
to respect established
community boundaries, we
must draw district lines
that respect the needs of the people.
Not tailor them to the
political needs of either party.
- If we want a better politics,
it's not enough just
to change a congressman
or change a senator, or
even change a president.
We have to change the system
to reflect our better selves.
I think we've gotta end
the practice of drawing
our congressional districts
so that politicians
can pick their voters, and
not the other way around.
- It shouldn't surprise us
that presidents of both parties
have come out strongly in
favor of redistricting reform.
As well as a number of
other political leaders,
who know the process well.
Everybody realizes that this is something
that both parties have
been guilty of in the past,
and it's gotta end.
- [Narrator] So how does
gerrymandering actually work?
In 2015, the Washington
Post gave a clear example
of how this happens.
Let's say we have 50 people
who have to be divided
among five districts, with each district
sending one representative to
the House of Representatives.
Of those 50 people, 60
percent are in the blue party,
and 40 percent are in the red party.
Now, if you were able
to draw district lines
so that you have three
perfect blue districts,
and two red districts, you're home free.
Problem is, that's not always possible.
Even in the absence of politics,
when districts are supposed
to be compact and contiguous.
So let's try to make these
a little more compact.
If we divide it this way, that's compact,
but look what happens:
five blue districts,
and not a single red district,
even though nearly half
the voters are red.
So it's not fair.
And the lines could even be
drawn so they're not compact,
or fair.
If we do it this way, we end
up with just two blue districts
and three red districts,
in spite of the fact
that well over half the voters are blue.
That's what happens all too
often with gerrymandering.
The bottom line is: if
districts are manipulated
to be drawn in a manner that
promotes the self-interest
of legislators, while
ignoring the interests
of the citizens, your
voice does not matter,
and your vote does not count.
In the words of former
Justice Department Chief,
Jerry Hebert, gerrymandering
is the process
of turning democracy on its head.
(jazzy music)
With recent polls showing
that more Americans believe
in Bigfoot than approve of
the job Congress is doing,
the process of manipulating district lines
has several consequences,
whether the public realizes it or not.
- The central problem with
it is that gerrymandering,
the way it's done now,
produces a maximum number
of non-competitive seats.
And then if somebody is
in a non-competitive seat,
they don't have to be that
responsive to their constituents.
The other thing it does
is it tends to produce
districts that are
overwhelmingly Republican
or overwhelmingly Democratic,
which means that the elections
often go to the people who
have kind of the positions
at the edge, the more extreme positions.
- The most harmful
consequence is that it is one
of the factors that is fueling
the rampant partisanship
and gridlock that is being
experienced both in Washington,
and in Richmond, where
things can't get done,
or that there is such
vitriol between the two
political parties, that partisan success
is more important than good government.
- Right now, qualified folks, maybe folks
from the business community,
maybe a retired CEO
wants to come in and say, you know,
I wanna bring my business experience,
or her business experience to the job,
he's not gonna do it,
because you can't win.
- Gerrymandering means more often than not
that the real election
becomes the primary.
And the primary, and again,
for both political parties,
is often dominated by
the most extreme voices.
So you have a minority
of a minority, in effect,
choosing who's going
to be your congressman,
who who's going to be your state senator,
or state delegate, and
too often that means
it makes the candidates who
are nominated to the extremes,
of the left or the right, and we see then
that kind of breakdown take
place in dramatic ways,
here in Washington, and unfortunately,
we're seeing it take place more
and more often in Richmond.
- With both political
parties now being polarized
for the most part, on
the right and the left,
one of the things that's changed
is that there are no moderates.
Or few moderates in
either political party,
and certainly virtually no
liberals in the Republican party
and no conservatives in
the Democratic party.
That's changed; that was not
the case 20 or 30 years ago.
- I told the general assembly during my
State of the Commonwealth,
let us work together
on job creation, economic development,
education, transportation,
all of these issues
which voters elected us to do,
and don't waste your time
sending me socially-divisive
pieces of legislation,
because I'll veto them.
But they still went ahead and did it.
Why did they do it?
Because they've gotta
worry about the primary.
- Whether you're a
liberal or a conservative
or a moderate, I think you
would rather have a functioning
Article One legislative branch
than one that's gridlocked.
And a lot of the gridlock in Washington,
and frankly the gridlock
in state capitals,
and the inability to tackle
some of the major issues,
is related to redistricting abuses.
- It is what, I think,
leads to the gridlock
that's happening in
Congress, where neither side
is willing to give, and we have
session after session where
bills don't get passed and
nobody is talking to each other.
- More and more often, I think Virginians
and Americans say: well,
I'm not even gonna vote.
And we've seen in, particular,
non-presidential years,
voter turnout in Virginia go
as low as around 40 percent.
In a state like Virginia,
where in our own lifetimes,
people protested in the streets and led a
Civil Rights Movement which
was all about trying to empower
and making sure every
Virginian got a chance to vote.
- One of the reasons why
voter turnout is so low
is that the incumbent is
almost always reelected,
and very few are opposed.
Two years ago, in the
congressional elections,
there are 435 seats, in the United States
House of Representatives,
and only 32 of those 435
were considered to be "competitive".
And of those 32 that were competitive,
only seven were considered to be toss-ups.
So 400 were not considered
to even be competitive,
because of political
gerrymandering, primarily.
- [Narrator] The same
can be said for districts
within Virginia's General Assembly,
with the elections in 2015 proving that,
no matter how hard each
side tried to change
the makeup of the state senate,
the needle wasn't moving.
- Again, a lot at stake in
today's state senate races.
On the line was the possible change
of power in that chamber.
- But in the end, amazingly,
no incumbents lost their races.
That means Republicans keep
control of the state senate.
- Quentin Kidd, our CNU
political analyst joins us now
with more on what all of this means.
Quentin, $45 million
spent, no incumbents lost,
no seats changed hands,
and the governor spent
a lot of political
capital on this electon.
What did he get for it?
- Yeah, I'm not sure the
governor got anything at all.
This is also testament
to just how gerrymandered
Virginia is, I mean, we
had $45 million-plus spent,
and not a seat changed,
and not an incumbent lost.
- Now, I worked hard
to try to get one seat
in the state senate.
Went out and raised, I
think, like $18 million.
After all the effort, both sides,
they stayed exactly the same.
- In the age of computers,
you can gerrymander
with scientific precision, you
can run in and out of alleys,
and up and down streets,
and carefully include
and exclude whichever voters
you want in one district
and not in another, so it's
become a very precise science,
and it's linked with
increased partisanship.
- So this is redistricting
software that can be used by
legislators when they're drawing maps,
local governments when
they're drawing districts,
or even litigators or non-profits
when they're trying to
provide alternate maps,
and show how much better
districts can look.
And so these blue lines are
the place that you vote,
and everyone who votes with you.
And with a simple click of a mouse,
I could pick up one whole voting precinct,
one whole voting district,
and move it from one
district, into another.
And that's the kind of
action that legislators do,
as they're drawing these maps.
For example, if I want
to change the border
between district 71 and district 70,
I can simply click the census blocks
that I want to move from
one district to the next,
and click and move them over.
Those census blocks
literally, city blocks,
are now no longer in district 70.
They're in district 71.
Legislators can make one
district very, very heavily
in favor of their opposition party,
and all of the neighboring parties
just favorable enough that
they can win election.
The result can be that
they don't win the majority
of the votes but they win the
majority of the seats, anyway.
- Running a campaign is so scientific now.
And I've just, I don't know
if people realize this,
but I could take the data
that we have available,
and I could go to each house and tell you
who's in that house, do they
vote, and how they vote.
And so when you combine
that with a legislator
who wants to stay in
power, that's a bad recipe.
But that's the reality of it.
(pensive music)
- The evil today that, the
driving force, I think,
in partisan gerrymandering
now is maximizing
the strength of a given party.
You pack as many people
of the opposing party
into as few districts as possible,
spread the other districts out in a way
that you can have a manifest advantage,
in the elections in your state.
This happens all over the country.
- [Narrator] Packing takes the noble goal
of increasing minority participation,
as mandated by the Voting Rights Act,
and turns it on its head.
Virginia's third district
makeup that was overturned
by the Supreme Court in 2016
is an example of packing
as a form of racial gerrymandering,
which had the effect of
suppressing minority voting power
in surrounding districts.
- Let me tell you what
was so illegal about that.
It prevented African Americans
from having any influence,
at other boundaries, other districts
that surrounded the third.
And so to the extent that gerrymandering,
for racial reasons, is illegal,
is because that's exactly
what has happened.
I used to say that they pretty much put
all the African Americans on one island.
- There have been concerns expressed about
racial gerrymandering,
and the Voting Rights Act,
but the truth is the Voting Rights Act
only requires that minorities have a fair
opportunity to elect
candidates of their choice.
It doesn't require packing
minorities into the district,
and it doesn't require
creating a super-majority.
That's what's been done
by the gerrymanderers,
to promote their own partisan agenda.
- Certainly, it's
devastated the communities,
because when it comes to representation,
when you have communities of interest,
and the districts are
lumped or packed together,
solely on ethnicity, the court has ruled
that was unconstitutional, but here it is.
Those who are mapping and
those who are drawing districts
have gotten smart, and now it's called
political gerrymandering.
So now, the challenge is
gonna be not so much racial
gerrymandering, because the
court has pretty much said:
that's unconstitutional.
Based on, you know,
cases that we're seeing,
and cases right here in Virginia,
in the third congressional district.
Political gerrymandering
will be the next challenge.
That these districts are now drawn because
of their political
affiliation, political leaning,
and they are drawn to manipulate
the voter constituency.
- [Narrator] The 2010 off-year elections
turned a record number
of state legislatures
from blue to red.
And those legislatures
succeeded in gerrymandering
district lines to solidify
their gains for years to come.
It was all the brainchild of Richmonder,
Chris Jankowski, and the
initiative he created.
Operation Red Map, the
Redistricting Majority Project.
- This was the guy I
picked, who's here for
the interview tonight, I
picked him a my nominee
for the unsung political
genius of our time.
It was the job of Red Map to specifically
try to win in the states,
and to get even more specific
than that, their plan, what
they were designed to do,
was to flip as many state
legislatures as possible,
from Democratic control
to Republican control.
From blue to red.
- The trick here was trying
to go to the national donors
and the national folks and say, hey, look,
here's an opportunity in
the state legislatures
to what we thought was,
set it up in 2012 to take
the US Congress, but
by the summer of 2010,
we realized well, we're
gonna get the House,
so what we're gonna do is lock that in.
Well, sure, you have
to take the clock back
and realize that President
Obama had been elected,
lost completely control of the congress.
So, Democrats had complete
control in Washington,
and they had control of the issue agenda.
And ah, Republicans were demoralized,
and so there was a group
of folks that came together
and thought: okay, what can we
do to slowly turn this tide?
You can't turn this tide overnight.
Republicans worked hard, in some ways,
to get themselves in the
hole we found ourselves in
at that point, and one of the things was,
well, redistricting is coming up.
And the 2010 elections
are gonna be the final,
and the last elections that'll
have the last say in that.
And who will have the
advantage that could be built.
We had some ideas on how
that could be pulled off.
I mean, we set a record
for any political party
in this country, ever, in the gain of,
net gain of state legislative seats.
I certainly did not go in thinking,
well, we're gonna set a record.
But we did.
And I definitely, by
Friday before the election,
I told the Washington
Post that we were looking
at upwards of 14 to 15
state legislative gains,
chambers, which is by
definition a wave year,
and we ended up with 20.
I am skeptical of redistricting reform.
I'm not against it, though.
I do think both parties
are capable of overreach.
And when you do that, I
hope the voters punish them.
My thing is, once you pick up this pen
and you start drawing that map,
and you have to decide:
do I go down this street,
do I go left, do I go right?
Where does this district turn left?
Where does it, how, what
is compact and contiguous?
Every decision has a partisan impact.
Has an impact on the Republican
or Democratic performance
of that district, and so
it's inherently political.
So I feel like, going
back to our Constitution
and our founding fathers,
they tended to put
the inherently political
things into the hands
of the inherently political people.
And they just let the people
who elect those people sort it out.
(blues music)
♪ Well just change the boundaries, ♪
♪ Redraw the lines ♪
♪ Because the people in
these districts vote ♪
♪ The wrong way every time, ♪
♪ But move the borders
and we will dominate ♪
♪ First take away the people's choice ♪
♪ And then we'll rule the state ♪
(pensive music)
- [Narrator] A number of
states are considering
and implementing redistricting reform.
Among the first in recent years
to gain a great deal of
attention was California,
where the citizen initiative,
Proposition 11 was passed in 2008.
With the support of governor
Arnold Schwarzenegger,
Proposition 11 was
designed to take the power
of redistricting out of the
hands of the legislators,
who stood to gain by
protecting their own turf.
- [Man's Voice] Was that a yes, governor?
- He said that his whole
entire office is gonna vote yes
on Proposition 11.
- [Man's Voice] Ring that bell!
(bell ringing)
- And I'm gonna give you a compliment.
He says that you explained
it so eloquently,
he says there's no way not to vote yes.
- The district lines were being drawn
by the very politicians that held office,
and they were being drawn more with an eye
towards protecting their seat,
and making their district safe for them,
so it would be less competitive
and there'd be less accountability.
- [Narrator] Global director Bonnie Reiss,
a former California
Secretary of Education,
worked for Massachusetts
senator Edward Kennedy,
before aligning herself
with the Republican,
Schwarzenegger.
Even after leaving office,
Schwarzenegger's reform efforts
continued with the creation of
the Schwarzenegger Institute
for State and Global Policy.
Based at the University
of Southern California,
the institute promotes
putting the interest
of the public ahead of political parties.
- They looked at two things:
one, the gerrymandered districts,
and how do we change that?
How do we end gerrymandering
and create a system
of redistricting that's fair and honest.
And the other one is our
top-two open primary.
And that was done as
a way to try to reduce
partisan divisiveness and extremism.
The concept was that if it's
an open, general primary,
where Republicans,
Democrats, independents,
any affiliation you have,
you run in the same primary,
and all of the California
voters vote for you.
And the top two vote-getters
go on to the general election.
- We've seen, in
California, a change where,
as a result of the redistricting reforms,
we now have Republicans who are talking to
the entire district, and
who, because they're not
in a super safe district,
and it's not necessarily
just the primary that
they're worried about,
they're thinking about
that larger picture.
- [Narrator] Meanwhile, voters
in Ohio have overwhelmingly
backed redistricting reform
for state legislative races.
And the Buckeye State's
Republican governor
has thrown his support
behind a move to extend
that reform to congressional
redistricting, as well.
- Making sure we all have
a chance to contribute,
and that we all have a voice,
is why we came together
last year, across party
lines, to reform the way
Ohio's legislative districts are drawn.
Our goal was the right
one, to make the process
less about politics, and
more about inclusion.
Ideas and merit should
be what wins elections,
not gerrymandering.
When pure politics is what
drives these kinds of decisions,
the result is polarization and division.
I think we've had enough of it.
Gerrymandering needs to be
on the dustbin of history.
- [Narrator] For recent
context, the 2012 congressional
elections showed that 52
percent of voters in Ohio
cast their ballots for
Republican candidates,
and 48 percent for the Democratic party.
A fairly even split.
But in the end, that
translated into 12 house seats
for the GOP, with just four
going to the Democrats.
Virginia's neighbor to the north
has been a mirror image
of the commonwealth,
with the Democrat legislature
and a Republican governor,
but the lopsided results
were similar to Ohio's.
In 2012, Democrats won in Maryland
by a nearly two to one margin,
but they ended up taking
seven of the Old Line State's
eight house seats, with
Republicans awarded just one.
- In Maryland, we have the
unfortunate distinction
of being the most gerrymandered
state in the entire nation.
We created a redistricting
reform commission,
to fight for the non-partisan
drawing of district lines.
Something that nearly all
Marylanders are strongly
in favor of, and we ask you
to join with us in that fight.
(applause)
- In fact, if you were to
stretch out the district line
of Maryland's third district,
it would reach from Washington
DC, just about to Boston.
And yet it only contains
an area about the size
of Montgomery County.
You know, it is, in its way,
a masterpiece of gerrymandering.
It is the state of the
art, in terms of that art,
as it now stands.
Remember that we lecture the world.
We point our finger at other countries,
and we tell them to be democracies,
and we tell them how they should
conduct their democratic practice.
Where do we get off doing that?
If you look at Maryland's third district,
how dare we?
We should fix our own house.
- [Narrator] Just to our
south is another heavily
gerrymandered state.
Don Vaughan served two terms
in the North Carolina senate,
in the process becoming best known
as the sponsor of a
bill that tightened the
Old North State's animal abuse statute.
But despite his accomplishments,
Vaughan's tenure was short-lived.
- My district now goes two
blocks around my house,
and is zoomed off to the Virginia line.
Never in the history of this area
has there ever been legislative
seats to go that way.
Not in the 200 year history.
There will be very few contested races,
because they have been drawn
to protect the incumbent,
or protect a particular individual.
Well, there's no point in
challenging that individual,
because you can't win.
That's bad for the system.
- [Interviewer] So are you
optimistic things will change?
- I'm hopeful things will change.
- There's no question that
there still is a cloud
over the southern states,
and there is a presumption
that things are done
on a racial basis, and whether
you believe that or not,
I think that we've got to do
something to totally dispel it.
- The effort to get politics
out of redistricting
is done around the country
in principally three ways.
The first is through
litigation in the court system.
And I've been working
on that in Wisconsin,
and there's also litigation in
Maryland and North Carolina.
The second is through
citizen-led ballot initiatives.
And this has been quite
successful in states like Arizona,
California, Colorado, Idaho, and Florida.
The third way is for
politicians, themselves,
to pass legislative reform.
This has worked in New York,
and to some extent, Ohio.
Now it's up to Virginia to
decide its path forward.
In Virginia, these issues
are all too familiar.
Take the 2012 congressional
elections once more.
Republican candidates took
a slim, two-point edge
in total votes case, but that translated
into just three seats for Democrats.
In fact, in national
congressional results,
Democratic candidates
received more than one million
more votes than their
Republican counterparts,
yet the GOP snagged 33 more seats.
(muttering)
But this goes beyond
disproportionate results in congress.
Those who have the power
to draw district lines
can target specific colleagues,
in order to make it impossible for them
to continue serving in office.
In Virginia's 2011 redistricting battle,
there was one very highly
publicized casualty.
Delegate Ward Armstrong,
the highest-ranking Democrat
in the House of Delegates.
- I was first elected to the Virginia
House of Delegates in 1991,
took office in January of '92.
Served there 20 years.
The last four years, I
was the minority leader,
the Democratic leader of the House.
I went through two redistrictings.
Survived one, but not the other.
My district was basically packed up
and shipped to northern Virginia.
The 10th House District
in Southside, Virginia,
ceased to exist; it was
moved, quite literally,
to northern Virginia.
- [Narrator] These new
district lines made it
nearly impossible for Armstrong to win
in his bid for reelection,
but he didn't give up.
He actually moved into a
family home a few miles away,
in the newly redrawn Ninth House District.
A controversial decision at the time.
- In retrospect, I'd have been better off
throwing in the towel,
but that just is not
something that's part of my fabric.
You know, I've never
ducked a fight in my life,
and I wasn't going to
let them take me out,
in a redistricting bill.
They were gonna take me
out at the ballot box.
They did, but it wasn't without a fight.
And I fought with every
inch and breath in me
on how to keep that seat.
Impossible.
Couldn't be done.
- [Narrator] Despite his
persistence throughout
the campaign, delegate Armstrong
lost his reelection bid in 2011.
And he was persistent.
- Anybody who knows me for five minutes
can tell that shy and retiring are not
two of my stronger qualities.
That I raised hell on a daily basis with
the Republican majority, and
they wanted to silence me
because I was a pain in their neck,
maybe three feet lower.
- [Narrator] Armstrong now
practices law full time
in Martinsville.
He's also moved back home.
- In 2011, Virginia was
in a unique position.
The General Assembly had divided control,
where the Senate was
controlled by Democrats
and the House was
controlled by Republicans.
And what reformers were hoping that meant
was that we'd actually
get redistricting reform,
since no party had a monopoly here.
- [Narrator] Instead, what
Virginia got was a heavy dose
of incumbency protection, where lawmakers
of both parties in both houses made deals
to protect their own seats.
- The problem is, it's
such inside baseball
that there's a disconnect,
you start to talk about
raising somebody's taxes or we're gonna do
something that's gonna
impact your kids' school,
or touch your life directly,
but when you start to
talk about redistricting,
it is so far disconnected
from most people's lives
that it just doesn't resonate as an issue.
It is the most insidious, invasive part
of the political process;
it permeates everything.
And I think it's a cancer
on the political system,
and I don't think that's an overstatement.
- [Narrator] But
Republicans certainly aren't
the only ones guilty of
this in recent memory.
In the early 1990s, there was another,
even higher profile victim of
gerrymandering in Virginia.
- Too often, now,
redistricting is used to keep
somebody in a seat, rather than
draw somebody out of a seat.
But we have a very
famous case, recent case,
in Virginia's history where George Allen,
congressman George Allen, was
drawn out of his district,
very successfully, by Democrats.
- Well, it was 1991,
and it was quite a year
in the Allen family life.
In July of that year,
French Slaughter, who was
a congressman from the Seventh
Congressional District,
where I resided, unexpectedly announced
that he was gonna resign, mid-term.
So there was gonna be a special election.
Folks said: you gotta run for it.
We won the nomination, won the election.
I was on top of the world, exhilarated.
Two weeks later, the
General Assembly gets to
congressional redistricting,
and they find my log house
that was on a gravel road in the foothills
of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and put it in
with Tom Blighly's City
of Richmond District.
Folks said: well, you oughta move.
And I said: ah, I don't know.
That doesn't seem right to move.
And it didn't seem right, either,
to run against Tom Blighly,
who is senior to me
and a good counsel to me, and so, ah,
a lot of people said: well,
you ought to run for governor.
So we started off, when
they first did a poll,
I was 31 percent behind,
but ultimately won.
- [Narrator] Allen left
the governor's office
in 1998 with an approval
rating above 60 percent,
and later became a United States Senator.
All because he was forced out
of his congressional district
a decade earlier.
- Things work out; the lord
works in mysterious ways.
(pensive music)
So, if prominent members of
both major political parties
agree there's a problem, where
does Virginia go from here?
How do we tackle these
systemic issues, head on?
- One Virginia 2021 is
a special organization.
It was founded by members of
different political parties
who all came together and
said that these districts
belong to Virginians,
not to any politician
or any political party, but to Virginians.
And we've got to find
a way to restore that.
- The reason I was so
willing and so excited
to help launch One Virginia
is because while I was
in the General Assembly, I
saw firsthand how critical
it was for legislators to work
together to solve problems.
And while reform is not gonna
change the number of seats
dramatically, what it will
do is make the districts
less partisan and less polarized,
actually giving legislators
a chance to reach across
the aisle, work together, debate
ideas, and solve problems.
- [Narrator] According to One Virginia,
their mission is to
advocate for the creation
of an independent
redistricting commission,
independent of the General Assembly,
to draw legislative district lines.
The commission would be required to use
clearly-defined, objective criteria,
invite public participation,
and be fully transparent.
- We're fighting this
battle on all fronts.
Through public education,
through grassroots advocacy
to our state legislature,
and in the courts.
The court battle are
important because they add
a sense of urgency to the
timeline of an otherwise,
every decade process,
but they also help curb
the most egregious excesses
of the last redistricting
we went through.
But at the end of the day, in 2021,
Virginia's gonna be faced with having
to draw new lines for our
state legislature and congress.
We gotta fix the process,
we've gotta get it right.
- In my 18 years in the
Attorney General's Office,
I handled all of the major
redistricting litigation
in the commonwealth.
I got to see, firsthand,
how both parties manipulated
the lines and distorted their districts
to preserve their own partisan advantage.
The system was corrupt then,
and it is still corrupt now.
We need to fix it, and we
need to use all of the tools
available to us, including
grassroots education,
legislative reform, and the courts.
- [Narrator] One element of
One Virginia's comprehensive
strategy was the creation
of a web campaign,
prior to the 2016
General Assembly session,
that was designed to tap
into voter frustration,
while reaching out to more
young people across Virginia.
The video looks and feels like
a traditional political ad,
but it features a fake candidate,
with a strangely familiar-sounding name.
- I'm Jerry Mandering,
and I approved this message.
Virginians need change
and hope or whatever.
And I'll bring change and hope or whatever
by picking my voters and
redrawing district maps
to ensure I always get re-elected.
Heck every single member
of the General Assembly
who was already in office
got reelected last year,
thanks to the commonwealth's
unfair redistricting process.
- [Narrator] With a
candidate literally named
Jerry Mandering, One
Virginia brought to life
how public officials can be unreceptive
to their constituents,
simply because they know
how safe their district lines are.
- So vote for me, Jerry Mandering.
Probably definitely running unopposed.
(uptempo music)
- Some people in the
General Assembly deserve
a lot of credit; they've
been working on this issue
for a very long time, even at the risk
of hurting their own party.
- I will tell you that when
I introduced it in 1982,
Democrats were dominant
in the legislature.
I thought it was a
statesmanlike thing to do,
for heaven's sakes!
I reintroduced it now with
the Republicans in power,
and they have sometimes started
their committee meetings
by saying: oh, yeah, we understand
why you want to do that.
You want to get back in power.
And I hold up my little 1982 bill and say:
see, I was doing this back
when Democrats were in power.
Because it's the right thing to do.
- I've been an advocate for
reform measures in the past,
and I've carried legislation
almost every year
since I've been elected.
There are lots of ways to get there,
and there are lots of moving parts
in the redistricting process,
but at the end of the day,
however you do it, whatever
your reform measure is,
coming up with a process
where you feel like the public
and your constituents believe that,
number one there's transparency.
Number two, there's consistency,
and number three, there's
fairness in that process.
- You will never take politics,
altogether, out of it.
But I think an independent group will have
less political considerations
influencing the decisions,
than if elected politicians have at it,
and no one else is involved.
- I've come to the
conclusion that the best way
is to have non-partisan
redistricting commissions,
or a bi-partisan redistricting commission,
or an independent
redistricting commission,
to draw maps that are fair,
and that favor the voter
and not the incumbent.
- It always passes in the Senate.
There's always been bi-partisan
support, in the Senate.
And then it gets to the
House and it usually,
usually in a wee hour of the morning,
in a subcommittee where
there's no recorded vote,
it just kind of fades away.
And that's the last folks hear about it,
until the next year.
- Morning everyone, we're gonna go ahead
and bring the subcommittee to order here.
- Madam chair, members of the committee.
I'm Mindy Carlin, and I
represent the Northern Virginia
Chamber Partnership that
includes the Lowden County,
Dulles regional, and
greater Wrestin chambers
in Northern Virginia, 2,800 businesses,
representing 100,000 jobs, and
I'm here to express support
for the criteria bills that
you heard about earlier.
- Good morning, I'm Mary Joe Fields,
with the Virginia Municipal League.
We too support redistricting reform.
- Carol Naga, with the League
of Women Voters of Virginia.
And we certainly support changes
in the redistricting process.
- I'm John Easter, with the
Greater Richmond Chamber.
I'd like to express our
support for the three
redistricting criteria bills.
- I'm Kathy Bircher,
with the Virginia Education Association.
We also are in support
of the criteria bills,
and the voter referendum bills.
- Reggie Ford, with the
Richmond Crusade for Voters.
We do support the redistricting.
- My name is Demos Budreau, I represent
the Virginia Coalition
of Latino Organizations
in the Virginia Hispanic
Chamber of Commerce,
and we support legislation
that would encourage
fair and open redistricting, thank you.
- My name is Karen Raschkey,
representing the Richmond First Club.
We support redistricting
reform for fair redistricting,
and any and all these
bills make a giant step
in that direction.
- Is there anyone that would like to speak
in opposition of the bills?
Any more comments this morning?
Any questions from the
committee on the bills?
For any of the patrons?
- There's no such thing as an
independent redistricting commission.
And there's no way to take the politics
out of an inherently political process.
You know, whenever you set up
these independent commissions,
the politics just goes
to a different level.
As to who makes the
appointments to the commission,
who gets to serve on the
commission and so forth.
So, I'm sorry, but I've
seen various independent
redistricting plans, and
none of them, I think,
really take the politics out of it.
They just elevate it to
a less transparent level.
So, ah, so I'm gonna
make a motion that we,
based on that, that we table
all the bills and block one.
- [Woman's Voice] Please
respond by saying "aye".
- [Legislators] Aye.
- [Woman's Voice] All opposed.
- [Legislators] No.
- Madam Chair, if I could just
say for the record, I mean,
those bills were, a lot of
them were very different.
And had merits and maybe
non-merits to be discussed.
This is the first time I
can remember five bills
that were so different being
put in one block to be killed.
- I was very disappointed
that the majority used
a procedure, I did not
know this was gonna happen,
to put all five bills of substance,
that affect better,
non-partisan, bi-partisan,
redistricting into one
motion to table all five
of them at the same time,
and a motion to table
is not, it's not discussable.
You can't debate it.
- That's the way business is done
over in the House of Delegates.
Should they choose not to
have a piece of legislation
see the light of day, they
put people in particular
that they select on those committees,
who would be opposed to redistricting,
because it would threaten their chances
of staying in the seats that they hold.
And so those committees are stacked.
That's politics at its best or worst,
whichever way you're looking at it.
(somber music)
- I've always claimed
that I have the right
to be smarter today than I was yesterday.
And I am much smarter
today than I was yesterday.
We drew districts that
protected incumbents.
It's just the way the culture is.
However, that process
undermines democracy.
It's not healthy for
the democratic process.
- In the 200-plus years
of Virginia's history,
there's never been a sustained period
between redistricting where
there's been a conversation
about redistricting like
there has been right now.
- 20 years ago, if you had mentioned
an independent redistricting commission,
it would have been laughed
off of capital hill.
But now people are actually
listening and voting for it.
- We need to build political
momentum over time,
and it seems to me that's the
far better approach to this.
And that what they are doing
is that they are educating
more citizens about
this, they are educating
more legislators about this.
They're getting more support from people,
in you know, governors and
prior governors and the like.
And that this is the way to actually
sort of move this forward.
- I believe that once people
get more familiar with it,
and understand, and we perhaps go through
another redistricting, that
we'll, I think we'll get there.
Absolutely.
- I was born and raised in Virginia,
and I love this commonwealth.
Best place to live, on Earth,
as far as I'm concerned.
But I also remember massive resistance.
I remember school segregation.
I remember the vestiges of the darker days
in Virginia's history.
We got past that.
I don't see why we can't
hope for the same thing
with legislative apportionment.
- The Millennials are sick and tired
of this party label thing
They want to know about the person,
and they want to know what that person,
how that person's gonna represent them,
and they insist on transparency.
I think it's gonna have
to change, I really do.
- This is ridiculous.
It is too complicated to figure out
where to vote and who my
delegate is, or state senator.
There's gotta be a better way,
and I would hope that
somebody who's running
for governor in the future,
or attorney general,
lieutenant governor, state legislators,
will run on this issue,
make it one of those
"darn right" issues.
And I think people could get behind it,
because it's a good government issue.
- There are states that have done
non-partisan redistricting forums.
Why would we wanna be the last?
You know, let's be a leader
and join that effort,
and I would hope that
citizens might encourage
their legislators, in that way, you know,
what are you doing to promote
fair legislative districts?
- I've been very pleased to
see the business community
step up recently, in terms
of these state-wide efforts
to promote reform.
I'm proud of the fact that we've got,
in this Virginia reform effort,
both Democrats and Republicans,
former elected officials of great stature,
saying: hey, we need to
get this right in Virginia.
- I think you can only
postpone the right thing
from happening for only so long.
- People of good will will
have to step forward and say:
look, this is not the right
way for us to legislate.
That the voters should
have a right to choose
their representatives,
and that we want a fair,
non-partisan commission to draw the lines.
- It's not a question
of if it's gonna happen.
The question is when it's gonna happen.
I think we're closer now than ever.
(uptempo rock music)
♪ Making a living the old hard way ♪
♪ Taking and giving my day by day ♪
♪ I dig snow and the rain
and the bright sunshine ♪
♪ Draggin' the line ♪
♪ My dog Sam eats purple flowers, ♪
♪ Ain't got much, but
what we got towers, ♪
♪ We dig snow and rain
and the bright sunshine ♪
♪ Draggin' the line ♪
♪ Draggin' the line ♪
♪ I feel fine ♪
♪ I'm talking about peace of mind ♪
♪ I'm gonna take my time ♪
♪ I'm getting the good sign, ♪
♪ Draggin' the line ♪
♪ Draggin' the line ♪
♪ Loving the free and feeling spirit, ♪
♪ Of hugging a tree
when you get near it, ♪
♪ And digging the snow and the
rain and the bright sunshine ♪
♪ Draggin' the line ♪
♪ Draggin' the line ♪
♪ I feel fine ♪
♪ I'm talking about peace of mind ♪
♪ I'm gonna take my time ♪
♪ I'm getting the good sign, ♪
♪ Draggin' the line ♪
♪ Draggin' the line ♪
♪ Draggin' the line ♪
♪ (Vocalizing) ♪
