While "reform commissions" fiddle around the edges, fretting over voter ID cards and audit trails for voting machines, the worst damage to our electoral process has been done by politicians, engaging in a practice that helps neither party, in particular, but profoundly benefits the political profession, above all.
     The problem of gerrymandering is discussed, on rare occasion, but always as a regrettable partisan tiff. Never mentioned is something far more dire. That this foul practice effectively robs most Americans of a meaningful vote. While worsening the trend toward radicalization and "culture war," gerrymandering has also -- in effect -- gutted our legislative branch of government.
     But citizens may use some clever innovations of their own, in order to rise up and fight back.

American Democracy:

More Fragile Than We Think

Part One of a Nine-Part Series About the Evils of Gerrymandering
by David Brin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2006, by David Brin.
All rights reserved. No duplication or resale without permission.

On September 19, 2005, the Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James A. Baker, III and sponsored by the American University Center for Democracy and Election Management, issued a report containing 87 important recommendations for how to improve the U.S. Electoral process, ensuring better credibility, accountability and confidence in the nation's most basic political process.

The twenty-one distinguished members of the Commission -- including leaders from political parties, academia and nonpartisan groups -- focused on problems such as inaccurate voter registration, individual voter fraud, corruption of local and statewide procedures, improved voting machinery, absentee balloting, and so on.

This bipartisan endeavor, initiated in response to scandals that erupted during the 2000 and 2004 election cycles, is clearly sincere. Many commission recommendations are laudable, even obvious, although a few sparked controversy. Especially a proposal to achieve greater security by moving toward more standardized voter identification -- a trend that is already underway nationwide, as states unify procedures for issuing drivers' licenses. Americans tend to be prickly over the notion of a "national ID card." This will certainly be a hot issue during the coming decade, with technology itself casting the final, deciding vote.

Unfortunately, despite all their sincerity and wisdom, the commission ultimately nibbled at the edges, avoiding the worst problems and faults of our American electoral process. While some of the most egregious and blatant abuses from 2000 and 2004 may get fixed, nowhere does the report address a far more basic problem -- that some American votes are more influential than others. Sometimes a whole lot more.

In fact, under conditions that are growing worse daily, millions of Americans who think they have a vote, do not actually have one. Not one that is meaningful, that is.

One can hardly blame the Carter-Baker Commission for shying away from this larger issue of vote-effectiveness. After all, much blame lies rooted in the distribution of power among the states -- large vs small, rural vs urban -- that we inherited from history. Then there is the Electoral College, an archaic beast that cannot be killed or reformed, because that would require a Constitutional Amendment. (Or would it?)

And yet, even those relics of the past are not the worst culprits. In the coming series of short chapters, I want to guide your attention down a path that this Commission -- and may others -- could and should taken, exploring one of the most horrific betrayals of citizen sovereignty. One that threatens the very heart of our democracy.

It is a path with many complex twists and turns (hence ten short chapters!) But when all of the effects are tallied, you will see that this problem adds up to something far worse than the Electoral College... plus vote fraud, corruption, miscounted ballots and all those other messy issues... combined.

Indeed, when it comes to certain types of elections -- those that choose our delegates for the legislative branch of government -- most Americans have been denied any chance to choose their representatives. They have no real choice at all.

By quietly and gradually cranking up a process called gerrymandering, members of the Political Caste -- in both parties -- have managed to effectively seal most of us away from the very franchise that we all consider to be one of our most basic American birthrights.

Alta Sedent civilis vulnera dextrae...
(Deep are the wounds inflicted by civil strife...)

First, some context and background.

As we slowly recover, still quivering, from the traumas of Election 2004 -- further punched, pummeled and punctuated by war and nature's devastation -- here comes a tidal wave of punditry, telling us to begin girding for the next political season. Prepare for Election 2006... another gut-wrenching, nation-dividing descent into the "Culture Wars."

(Who could have predicted that we would someday look back with nostalgia on the Clinton-Dole campaign, as a time when politicians sometimes disagreed congenially over policy, while sharing a fundamental belief that government can be made to work?)

In one way, the 2006 campaign will be easier, emotionally. For one thing, it won't directly involve the Presidency, much to the relief of George W. Bush, given his slide in popularity.

Instead, attention will focus on Congress.

Will one party continue to control all three branches of government? Or will voters choose to stir in some fresh faces and, perhaps, a little accountability?

This could be of special importance right now. If either house of Congress passes into Democratic control next year, one immediate effect will be to suddenly invigorate a dozen oversight and investigation committees, which have lain mostly dormant for six years. Just picture the ferment when those torpid committees are abruptly staffed with scores of newly-assertive investigators, empowered with stacks of subpoenas, summoning scores of administration officials -- and whistleblowers -- in a veritable festival of accountability, unlike anything since 1994, when Newt Gingrich & Co. swept into control over the House, carried by the reform rhetoric of his "Contract with America."^*

Of course, all of this assumes that political issues -- or even voter opinion -- will make a difference in outcome, during the campaign for who controls Congress.

But that assumption may be dead wrong. One trend, that has built momentum across several decades, may insure that the average voter will have very little influence over the outcome of the US Congressional elections, come November 2006.

No, I am not talking about outright cheating, though we certainly have seen a disturbing and outrageous burst of truly despicable behavior, ranging from fraudulently rigged voting machinery to manipulation of voter rolls, from corruption of sworn officials to dirty trickery, all of which contribute to a decline of faith in democracy, perhaps even debasing the word "freedom" itself. (See recommendations of the Carter-Baker Commission.)

But even vote-fraud is small potatoes.

After all, cheating of the kind we saw in Florida in 2000, and Ohio in 2004, can only work when the polls are already very close. Is a 51:49 outcome any more of a legitimate mandate than 49:51? At worst, outright cheating can nibble at the edges of a system that is rotting from the inside.

No, I want to draw attention to a different kind of manipulation. One that has ensured that close elections for US Congress almost never happen.

It is the same shameless manipulation that prevents all but a few Americans from having any real voting power over who will represent them on Capitol Hill.

Quietly, without much comment or notice, the practice of gerrymandering has transformed from a dismal-but-bearable tradition of occasional opportunism into a cancer eating at the heart of democracy itself, rendering our votes nearly meaningless in countless constituencies across the land.

Next... the detailed skinny on gerrymandering.

*An aside about the prospect (if Democrats win control over House or Senate) of sudden assertiveness by Congressional oversight committees:

Should even a sincere conservative call this prospect of divided government a bad thing? Certainly not an honest conservative who watched with concern the unambiguous and overwhelming increase in secrecy that has spread like a shroud, since the Bush administration took office. Can any student of human nature feel comfortable, knowing that so many cronies (even your side's cronies) are making so many deals in the dark?

Even if many of these deals are legal, should they not also be visible? Or have we become so entrenched in Culture War partisanship that each of us thinks light should only shine one-way? A war of competing searchbeams or light sabers, stabbing left or right, but never illuminating us all?

Those in power rationalize this surge-tide of cryptic concealment in the name of national security. But honestly, ask yourselves this question. Does the threat posed by Al Qaeda justify more secrecy than our society endured during the Cold War, when our opponent was the vast, sophisticated and evil Soviet Empire?

Over the long run, secrecy must become a core social and political issue. No matter where you stand along the spectra of belief about large or small government, about the role of market forces or taxation or the proper use of military power, don't we all know that shadows tempt the honest and lure the corrupt?

Looking back on the rhetorical success of Gingrich in '94, here's one trick the Democrats might try, if they wanted a startling jiu jitsu move. What if they stunned the nation by publicly adopting half of the planks in Gingrich's "Contract With America"?

Not the partisan half, those "planks" that justified a loony/selfish -- and disproved -- theory that looting the treasury will help balance budgets. But the other half. The planks that made sense, offering more air and light. Greater openness and accountability.

Those were the parts that citizens voted for in 1994.

And people are still waiting for those portions of the Contract to be fulfilled.

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