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More than meets the eye in redistricting
Mary Jane Garcia
Many constituents that I represent have raised their concern that nothing was done during the recent redistricting session, and I believe they deserve a response.
This years’ redistricting legislative session was expensive, contentious and has caused much disappointment to many New Mexicans – there is no denying that. My Senate colleagues and I understand the frustration that the public has with the outcome of the session, especially when our constituents wonder why it took 19 days to develop redistricting legislation that was ultimately vetoed by Governor Martinez.
The true story of the redistricting session is anything but 19 wasted days of “golfing” and time spent not doing anything. The story of the redistricting session was one of preserving the sacred rights of equal representation and voting rights granted to us through the N.M. Constitution and U.S. Constitution. It was a continuation of the fight that African Americans faced when they willfully met the gnashing of canine teeth, blasting of water cannons, burning of tear gas and pounding of police batons in Selma, Alabama – all to guarantee the right to vote.
It was the fight of the Native American, which for nearly 172 years, from the inception of our country, did not have the right to vote. It was the persistence of Hispanics fighting to not have their political voice diluted by clever gerrymandering of district lines. This story was the great modern day reminder of the sacrifice leading to the approval of women’s suffrage.
42 senators making changes to 1,483 precincts
Along with the tremendous responsibility of the session went enormous effort. Preparations for the session actually began in 2010 as the federal government conducted the decennial census. As the 2010 census was being completed, the Legislative Council Interim Committee met in January of this year to determine guidelines for the redistricting session.
Subsequently, Senator Linda Lopez and Representative Mary Helen Garcia were chosen to serve as co-chairs of the Redistricting Interim Committee, which was made up of 40 members of the Legislature. In order to gain community input, the co-chairs convened five meetings throughout the state from June to August of this year.
The interim committee’s work developed into eight concepts for the House, nine concepts for the Senate, seven concepts for Congress, five concepts for the PRC, and one concept for the Public Education Commission.
We were able to take the interim concepts into the session, and that’s when much more technical and time-consuming work began.
In the context of an individual Senate redistricting concept, we were tasked with assigning 2,059,179 people in New Mexico to 1,483 precincts that make up 42 Senate districts.
Enormous challenges were found at the precinct level. As I worked on my Senate district, I found that simply adding one precinct could require a neighboring senator to pull one or more precincts from their neighbor and a similar occurrence happening thereafter. One precinct change in Southern N.M. would often result in a “domino effect,” eventually requiring changes to districts in Northern N.M.
Imagine all the different combinations possible when 42 senators were simultaneously making changes to 1,483 individual precincts! Now, this is all in reference to only one Senate concept.
The great struggle
The previous complexities do not even point out the central rules that were to be followed, such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965, preservation of minority voting rights, one-man-one-vote, and sustaining communities of interest.
Measuring the success of the redistricting session requires looking beyond clever slogans and glitzy sound bites. An accurate view shows that the work done during the special session was significant, heartfelt and meaningful.
Redistricting allowed many of us to stand on the shoulders of those who came before us to persist in the great struggle of assuring equal voting rights for all people in New Mexico.
Garcia, a Democrat, represents District 36 in the N.M. Senate and is majority whip. She was also a member of the 2011 Interim Redistricting Committee.
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Mr. Spiri:
What video archive? Could you perhaps provide a link, since the Sunshine Portal website itself a) isn’t properly searchable, and b) doesn’t actually have video links? Did you perhaps mean the Legislative Council Service? Secondly, barring that, in what context were these comments made? Considering that (and I admit that this is just as I remember it) Senator Kernan was one of several Republicans who complained that with the decline in rural population and the requisite shifting of districts, certain members of her party would find themselves in primaries against each other or running against incumbent Democrats in the newly combined districts, in which case Senator Garcia’s comment (as you describe it, and which I do not personally recall) is a perfectly reasonable – albeit somewhat sarcastic – response. As for your assertion that one Senator per county “worked just fine” between 1912 and 1965, I think that statement is itself debatable, but also moot, since the reason we changed it in 1965 is because that’s when the Voting Rights Act went into effect, making that method of disproportionate representation illegal.
Also, JusticeP, since I just noticed your questions floating down there – and likely to go unanswered by Senator Garcia – I thought I should give you a quick set of answers:
-New Mexico (to the best of my knowledge) has never been accused of a major violation – at least so far as redistricting is concerned – of the Voting Rights Act… though obviously if Mr. Spiri were to have his way, that would change in a hurry.
-The phrase “communities of interest” is a specific phrase from the same Act intended to sustain it beyond the Civil Rights era itself so that State’s wouldn’t resume ethnic, economic, or creed-based discrimination in future redistricting actions. It is this phrase that got Texas in so much trouble in about 2004.
-The state Constitution actually doesn’t mention redistricting at all; in fact, the only time the word is even used is regarding reapportionment should the legislature add a new district court judges. It is something we are statutorily – rather than constitutionally – required to do, and the statutes in question are mostly Federal. Essentially, the legislature failing to do the job, doing a poor job, disagreeing with the Governor about how it should be done, or (as they sort of did in a couple of the bodies in this case) punting on it more or less automatically forces it into the courts… one of which happens pretty much every time, anyway. My guess is if they did just try to delegate responsibility to someone else – even a computer program – someone would still probably sue… very likely the exact same people suing this time, really.
-This brings me to the computer program; my opinion is that such a program would be too complex to be practical. While programming it to simply know how many New Mexicans lived where and do the math is simple enough, it’s that phrase “communities of interest” that throws a wrench in the works. The political, racial, and economic variables each individually add a level of complexity to the system that really do require human judgement to adequately address. This is to say nothing of the fact that, as soon as said program did the math and accounted for the obvious population shift, the same Republicans suing over their seats moving or disappearing because of that shift now wouldn’t exactly be losing the motives for their litigiousness.
IcarusPhoenix….Point well taken. However, I had the honor to actually be present during Senator Garcia’s ridiculous comments one day regarding Senator Gay Kernan supposedly having to move to Las Vegas. It is on video archive on the sunshine portal, should you want to view it. Senator Garcia exposed her lack of understanding of the process we call redistricting. It was not the first time she had done such a thing. As, majority whip, one would think the person occupying that position, would at the very least have a handle on redistricting. I level my statements with accuracy and for stand by them. Again, check the archives and listen to her statements. Senator Garcia, along with some other archaic members of the NM Senate, need to take a hike and retire. As for the matter of Harding county vs Bernalillo county and the population and whatever some expert wants to tell us….the fact remains that between 1912 and 1965, it worked just fine.
Mr. Spiri:
I will not argue that the Democratic representatives didn’t waste time as well, merely that, on the balance, they wasted less than their Republican counter-parts. Indeed, I’m the one who suggested at the beginning of this that they just pass a bill hiring Brian Sanderoff to do the redistricting for them and save us all money by adjourning, since more often than not, that’s who the court calls in whenever we have to go through this.
However, accusing Senator Garcia, specifically, of wasting time is a wildly unfair accusation. She and every other member of the interim committee – in both parties – who drew up the majority of these plans spent countless hours creating plans that were fair to all citizens, and it is quite frankly offensive to demean that hard work by choosing this particular issue to demonstrate such profound ignorance of of the duties and actions of the People’s representatives.
For that matter, as has been pointed out before, there isn’t a court in the country that would agree with you that Harding and Bernalillo would “each do fine” with only one Senator. As previously stated, the plan is ludicrously unconstitutional, as well as a violation of the Voting Rights Act. A county is a completely arbitrary set of borders that has no bearing on population whatsoever, and thus can not be used to determine fair and legal proportional representation.
IcarusPhoenix…..again, with all due respect….I will still stand by that Harding County and Bernalillo County would each do fine with one senator each, and no more, no less. As for blaming Democrats or Republicans….I only saw the article by Senator Garcia, no one else. Redistricting is a joke. It would have been better to bring in the folks on the courts that will ultimately decide what is in or what is out…..and go from there. Quite frankly, I don’t like wasting state money on a session that did nothing. Efficiency is my motto. Wasting time is politicians motto, and, in this case it was Senator Garcia that took the lead to write the article, so, I take the lead to take issue with her waste of time.
Mr. Spiri:
Let us set aside for the moment that the “one senator per county” idea, by definition, gives to one resident of Harding County the same political power as four-hundred thirty-nine residents of Bernalillo County, thus making the plan wildly unconstitutional and this entire conversation purely academic.
I was at the session in question; while I agree that all members of the legislature failed in their responsibility to at least pass plans for all of the five bodies which needed redistricting, I think you need to do a better job of spreading the blame around. The Senate and House Republicans, who are almost universally united in their criticism of being “kept out of the loop”, weren’t so much kept out of the loop as they practically refused to participate at all. Of sixty-three total redistricting plans, the Republican members only bothered to even introduce a grand total of ten… and fully half of those were for the PRC. Add to that their demands for seats gerrymandered to guarantee them uncontested races for nearly half the seats in both houses, that they complained about adding seats in the urban areas that actually had population growth (and which, I might add, were mostly guaranteed to be GOP-held seats, even under the Democratic plan) at the expense of regions that actually lost population, and that several of them openly stated that they cared more about protecting their party’s incumbents than seeing to it that all citizens of New Mexico were equally represented, then their wholly-manufactured outrage crosses the border into childish.
With all due respect to Senator Garcia, I must emphatically and completely disagree with her very clever excuse for doing absolutely nothing productive in the recent “special session”…which everyone knows was nothing special at all. Senator Garcia is an example of exactly why nothing got done. And the sad thing about it all is she received monetary compensation for her waste of time during the special session. This is a perfect example of why one senator per county in New Mexico is the best solution for such a mess as we have now. I can think of one too many Senators right now from Dona Ana County, New Mexico.
This whole travesty of a “redistricting” effort was dominated by polarized partisan agendas and it shows in the sorry product that came out, slanted and biased to one extreme side. My ancestors who wrote the NM Constitution in 1910 would be rolling over in their graves to see what Santa Fe has come to these days. In October 1910 100 delegates convened to write, from scratch, our Constitution. By mid November they were done with the entire document and had broad agreement and consensus among many diverse groups. Can you imagine what would happen with the current cast of clowns we have in Santa Fe if this gigantic task were undertaken today? Things were much better and our representatives and senators were much better in those days, just look what has happened to us now, a simple, easy thing like redistricting turns into the mess we witnessed. Sad.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 (42 U.S.C. §§ 1973–1973aa-6) is a landmark piece of national legislation in the United States that outlawed discriminatory voting practices that had been responsible for the widespread disenfranchisement of African Americans in the U.S. The Act established extensive federal oversight of elections administration, providing that states with a history of discriminatory voting practices. Has New Mexico been guilty in the past?
“sustaining communities of interest.” What does this have to do with redistricting?
Does not the NM Const. require the legislature to accomplish redistricting and not the courts?
Is it not possible by the technology of today to have a computer program equally divide the districts needed for each divisional requirement without the political game playing?
Ms. Garcia I would like to see a response to these questions , please.