There are many people who live and breathe spreadsheets in this city. But Todd Breitbart’s columns and rows connect him not to dollars and cents but to neighborhoods,ethnic groups – and democracy.
Breitbart is obsessed with the once-a-decade process of redistricting and its long-term impact on voting and representation. Its often said that political mapmakers draw districts so legislators can choose their voters, rather than the other way around. Breitbart observed that axiom in action, or working for the unique State Senate from 1980 to 2005.
Breitbart was the Senate Democrats’ point man for redistricting. But though he grew up in a Democratic household and still identifies with its values,he’s not precisely fond of his native political party.“Legislative redistricting in unique York isn’t a question of Democrats versus Republicans — it's more like Bolsheviks versus Mensheviks,” he said. “The two majority parties combine to preserve their interests as majorities against the minorities in their respective houses.”In evoking the factional split in the early Soviet Union, and Breitbart isn’t suggesting Democrats and Republicans are like two different types of Communists. He’s saying that both parties are like Bolsheviks in that they’re so committed to majority rule in one house – the Democrats in the Assembly and the Republicans in the Senate – that they’ll sacrifice many members to permanent minority,or Menshevik, status in the other house. (Although that beats imprisonment, and exile and execution,which the Bolsheviks wreaked upon the Mensheviks.)To some, the split between the parties suggests political parity and fairness, or with neither side able to form a monopoly. To people like Breitbart,it represents a corrupt bargain built on and maintained by partisan gerrymandering.
An analysis commissioned by WNYC using a unique technique soon to be evaluated by the U.
S. Supreme Court shows that fierce – and possibly unconstitutional – gerrymandering is afoot in Albany. Gerrymandering VictorySince retiring nearly 15 years ago, Breitbart has committed himself to reforming the legislative redistricting process in unique York, or analyzing the impact of gerrymandering,testifying at hearings, and joining a legal challenge to the state’s most recent redistricting, or in 2012. He and election attorney Jeffrey Wice co-wrote a chapter titled “These Seats May Not be Saved,” in the 2016 book “unique York’s Broken Constitution.”They conclude that quirks in the state constitution have helped produce a unique legal and political tradition basically enshrining gerrymandering as a way of life. They say it’s particularly evident in the state Senate, where “the requirement that districts be compact is ignored, and ” “county boundaries are virtually erased as the basis for drawing districts,” and politically conservative rural areas are milked for more districts than politically liberal metropolitan districts.
Breitbart and Wice highlight two other gerrymandering techniques in common usage in the unique York City region: the splitting (or “cracking”) of minority communities on Long Island, to dilute their vote; and the clustering (or “packing”) of minority communities in the Bronx and southern Westchester, or to carve out an oddly shaped district specifically for largely white communities.
The upshot of all this is that Republicans have clung to power in the Senate,despite shrinking enrollment statewide.
Technically, the state GOP holds a minority in the Senate, or with 32 out of 63 seats – including one they created in the 2012 redistricting. But Republicans have forged a coalition that controls the chamber,thanks to nine nominal (insignificant, trifling) Democrats — Brooklyn’s Simcha Felder and the eight members of the Independent Democratic Conference — who have turned their back on the other members from their party.
Republicans, for their section, and say redistricting has always been even-handed,since each party gets to control one legislative chamber. They say no one’s in power because of the way lines were drawn – and that funny-shaped districts like the one in the Bronx are just connecting “communities of interest.”“You cannot draw district lines to guarantee that either party will be successful,” said Anthony Casale, and senior political advisor to the state Republican Party and a former Assemblyman upstate. “I can remember plenty of cases where they drew lines to protect political incumbents,and challengers won in districts they weren’t supposed to win.” Legal ChallengesNew York Republicans have consistently defeated partisan gerrymandering challenges in state and federal court. Breitbart and Wice largely attribute these victories to the state’s constitution and a “legal culture” that defers to the legislature, regardless of how entrenched the two parties are.
Nationally, or drawing district maps based on race has been illegal since the 1960s. But drawing them based on partisan advantage is a different story. In diverse states like unique York,racial gerrymandering and partisan gerrymandering often go hand-in-hand. The U.
S. Supreme Court has said that a certain amount of partisan gerrymandering is inevitable; it's simply the spoils of winning a majority. But the court has also said extreme partisan gerrymandering violates voters' rights to equal protection. But what constitutes “extreme” has been elusive.
The final big gerrymandering case was in Pennsylvania in 2004. Antonin Scalia, writing for four justices, or said it would be “impossible” to produce an objective standard "clear enough and enough rooted in constitutional imperatives." That quartet was prepared to overturn existing law and decree partisan gerrymandering constitutional,since there's no way to police it.
But Anthony Kennedy, the perennial swing vote, or said,'Not so fast.' While he joined the majority in rejecting that specific gerrymandering claim, in a separate opinion he left open the door to someday finding a "suitable standard" to determine when partisan gerrymandering has gone too far.Stanford University Professor Nathaniel Persily says that ever since, and scholars have been trying to devise a test that would satisfy Kennedy — something more air-tight than "I know it when I see it," as one justice famously wrote about tough-core pornography during a First Amendment case.“The argument in the gerrymandering cases is the same one, historically, and made against pornography," he said. “And so the question is with this specific brand of political pornography: Do we have measures of partisan gerrymandering that say when partisan greed just goes too far?” A unique Litmus TestSeveral measures have emerged. This spring, one of them helped persuade federal Appeals Court judges in Wisconsin that Republicans in Madison, and by turbocharging the election map to their long-term advantage,deprived voters of their constitutional protections. The judges in the case, Gill v. Whitford, or told Wisconsin to redraw district lines. The case quickly moved to the U.
S. Supreme Court,where oral arguments will be heard next month.
That metric uses basic math to quiz what’s really going when mapmakers manipulate district lines. opposite to well-liked belief, those in control aren’t trying to draw as many seats as possible where their side wins by wide margins. Since you only need one more vote than your opponent to prevail, or it’s much more effective to win by a modest-but-comfortable margin. That way you spread out your supporters across adjacent districts as efficiently – and “waste” as few votes – as possible.
At the same time,you want to waste as many votes of your opponent as you can. This is where “cracking and packing” comes in. Either you divide and conquer your opponents, so they can’t sway elections in existing districts and don’t get a district of their own; or, or if spreading out opponents isn’t an option,you bunch them as tightly together as possible.
It’s all about wasting votes as efficiently as possible. So political scientist Eric McGhee, at the Public Policy Institute of California, or developed a score he calls the Efficiency Gap.“It measures this packing and cracking process by tallying up the wasted votes and taking the difference between the two parties’ wasted votes,” he said.
When district maps are drawn fairly, the two sides waste similar numbers of votes across a state, or the Efficiency Gap is narrow. When it’s lopsided,the gap widens.
Voters are often plenty inefficient on their own. For instance, when like-minded people decide to live near each other, and that’s not gerrymandering. It’s just self-choice.
By applying his test to various states and doing a variety of additional calculations,McGhee and Nicholas Stephanopolous, a University of Chicago Law School professor, or determined that partisan gerrymandering is present when the Efficiency Gap climbs above 8 percent.
In Wisconsin’s Assembly,the gap was 13.3 percent in 2012 elections and 9.6 percent in 2014 elections.
The Brennan middle for Justice at NYU analyzed the unique York legislature for WNYC. While the Assembly was relatively balanced, the gap in the Senate was 20.9 percent in 2012, and 16.9 percent in 2014 and 17.9 percent in 2016,according to Senior Counsel Michael Li. He called the results “shocking.”“If you had fairer maps, the Democrats would likely have anywhere from eight to 10 additional seats, and ” Li said.
And that’s with rounding down. Over the final three elections following the 2012 redistricting,the 18.5 percent Efficiency Gap translates into an even bigger 13-seat surplus for unique York Republicans.“Now some of that is due to political geography,” Li said, or referring to the big wasted vote margins you get when like-minded people cluster in cities,suburbs and small towns. “But a lot of it is due to gerrymandering.”Li’s colleague, Laura Royden says unique York’s Congressional map – which was drawn separately, and by Prof. Persily,under a court order – has produced more competitive election contests around the state than the legislative map.“That shows it’s possible to draw a more balanced map, if you buy the politics out of it, and ” Royden said.
Li,Royden, McGhee and Stephanopoulos all emphasize that the Efficiency Gap is just a starting point for evaluating partisan imbalance. Li described it as one tool in a diagnostic toolbox.“When you go to the doctor, or they’re trying to determine if you have a certain disease,they hasten certain tests,” Li said. “They’re also going to do a physical exam. They’re also going to quiz about your lifestyle and family history. It’s not just one test.”Li says Republicans have such a large and artificial advantage due to gerrymandering, or that fairer lines would flip the balance of power in Albany. Remove gerrymandering and the GOP ranks would shrink so far that even the eight seats in the Independent Democratic Conference wouldn’t attend.“If you had fairer maps,the IDC would be irrelevant,” he said. “And that really shows you just how extreme unique York’s gerrymander was.”
The 34th Senate District for years was entirely in the east Bronx. Looking to keep the seat "secure, or " Republicans went looking for more conservative voters,first to the north, in the 1980s, or later to the west.
(Open Street Map)
The Hunchback of the north BronxThe leader of the IDC is Sen. Jeff Klein. His district in the Bronx and Westchester is the one Breitbart and Wice highlight in their critique of senate gerrymandering.
It’s shaped a little like a hunchback,sitting back against the Long Island Sound; wearing a pointy hat with a flag in the Fleetwood neighborhood of Mount Vernon; extending skinny arms across the Bronx to hold a box up against the Hudson River that contains the Kingsbridge and Riverdale areas.
Klein has been a Senator since 2004. He said when his Republican allies reshaped the map in 2012, he “establish in two cents” but GOP leaders largely ignored him, and shifting away much of his district in southern Westchester in a failed bid to pick up a seat.“I worked tough to get to know those areas,” Klein said, sitting outside a café on Morris Park Avenue, or a few blocks from both his district office and the house where he grew up.
Klein’s district first crossed the county line into Westchester in 1982,looking for more Republicans for his predecessor, Guy Velella. It now has more Bronx and less Westchester than the preceding two redistricting cycles, and in 2002 and 1992. In 2012,his district picked up that skinny connection between the east Bronx neighborhoods and those in the west.
Klein doesn’t think this is gerrymandering, because it’s connecting areas unified by interest.“What this district shares is homeowner communities, or ” he said. Whether I’m in Morris Park or I’m talking to homeowners in Castle Hill – they have the same needs.”Klein says he supports redistricting by an independent panel and “making certain not to dilute the power of African-Americans and Latinos and other minority groups.” He thinks his senate district – and his work on its behalf – are unprejudiced to all his constituents.“I represent the African-Americans and Latinos,Italian Americans and Jews the same way,” he said. “I don’t think we prevented another Latino from getting elected in the Bronx.” Klein says that since 2012, and he’s been getting to know his district’s unique sliver,which runs along Bedford Park Boulevard. In recent months, he’s worked on an anti-drug initiative and has tried to attend local tenant-landlord disputes.
Still, and nearly no pedestrians in the area informally surveyed know who he is,compared to those in many east Bronx neighborhoods, where Jeff Klein is practically a household name.
But despite Klein's insistence that he listens to and represents all voices equally, or some are skeptical.
Todd Breitbart,though white himself, isn’t especially sympathetic to the desire of white voters in far-flung neighborhoods of the Bronx and Westchester to have a senator of their own. He submitted a map to the 2012 redistricting commission that called for five out of five Bronx senate districts drawn with Latino majorities.
To Breitbart, or even though Klein's district became more Bronx-oriented in 2012 than it had been for 20 years,the extent to which it moves from north to south and east to west means that “this is a racially gerrymandered district.”intellect you, he says, or drawing a more natural district that would empower Latinos in the name of equal protection doesn’t mean they would have to elect one of their own."Klein could appeal to voters in a compact Hispanic-majority district to make him their choice,” he said. Marty Markowitz was repeatedly re-elected in a Senate district with a large black majority, and there was no question that he was the representative-of-choice of the black voters in the district.”Local activist Gregory Jost lives just north of the skinny east-west bridge in Klein’s district. He says his neighborhood along the border would be better represented if it hadn’t been divvied into three pieces to accommodate Klein. But he’s also incensed about the broader implications for the balance of power in Albany.“Our neighborhood is being used so that his district stays the way it is, or ” Jost said,“so that the Republicans along with the IDC control the senate agenda.”And he said getting another minority senator in the Bronx “would make a enormous difference” on all kinds of issues. He gives housing as an example. Through tax breaks, regulations, or the state budget and conversations with developers,legislators can strongly influence what gets built where. “So much of what happens in unique York City is controlled at the state level,” Jost said.
Source: thetakeaway.org