Is California’s Redistricting Commission a Model to Avoid Partisan Gerrymandering?

In November of 2008, California voters narrowly passed Proposition 11. The ballot measure transformed legislative redistricting in the nation’s largest state, stripping political actors of their traditional power in the process and creating a first-of-its-kind nonpartisan citizens’ commission in their place. After successfully navigating the redistricting process following the 2010 Census, the California Citizens’ Redistricting Commission is set to once again fulfill its mandate upon the release of the 2020 Census results. T hough it is impossible to completely eliminate unfair districts, and despite the drawbacks of empowering an unelected group of citizens to make political decisions with far-reaching implications, the CCRC is still a successful example of how to mitigate partisan gerrymandering and more accurately represent the populations within a state.

Every 10 years, the United States completely redraws all of its congressional and state legislative districts using population data from the US Census. The Constitution empowers state legislatures to determine how lines are drawn, and in most states the power to redistrict continues to sit almost exclusively within their respective legislatures. Because redistricting is largely in the hands of partisan actors, the process frequently yields unfair maps—more commonly known as gerrymanders. While there is no singular cutoff or measurement for what constitutes a gerrymander (a big reason why the Supreme Court declined to outlaw the practice in 2019), the generally-accepted definition is that a gerrymander is “a manipulation of the boundaries of an electoral constituency so as to favor one party or class.”1 Various movements over several decades have sought to ban the practice, with little success.

Historically, California has been no exception to the practice of gerrymandering. In cases where the Legislature failed to agree on a map or couldn’t get theirs approved by the governor (the legislature was usually controlled by Democrats while the governor was often a Republican), the process was handed off to the California Supreme Court. While ostensibly nonpartisan, a team at UC Berkeley found that court-drawn maps usually favored the party whose governors had appointed a majority of justices.2

With biased maps frequently leading to partisan food f ights between different parties and branches of government, California was, in many ways, a poster child for what not to do when it came to redistricting. While less acrimonious than in past cycles, the redistricting process following the 2000 Census was one of the most unfair yet—bipartisan majorities in the Legislature passed an “incumbentmander” map protecting incumbents of both parties.3 The map attracted ridicule from advocates on both sides of the aisle, with one particularly long and misshapen district being dubbed “the Ribbon of Shame”, and energized California’s nascent electoral reform movement. With the passage of Proposition 11 in 2008 and the follow-up Proposition 20 in 2010, the reform movement successfully modified the state constitution to strip the Legislature of its redistricting powers, instead granting them to a newly-created bipartisan California Citizens’ Redistricting Commission.4 For the first time ever, a large state had fully empowered a nonpartisan, unelected body to draw its congressional and legislative maps. It was a bold experiment, no less so because California held more than 12% of all US House seats. Voters had transformed the electoral playing field not only in their state, but quite possibly for the whole country.

Now codified in California’s state constitution, the CCRC is composed of 14 members: five registered Democrats, five registered Republicans, and four Independents. Commissioners are selected via a lengthy process designed to ensure they have no connection to any potential candidates in the districts they are tasked to draw—commissioners are also barred from running for public office in California for five years following their selection. The state constitution gives the commission 3 sets of requirements, along with 3 wider guidelines. Required is that: districts must be reasonably equal in population, districts must comply with the federal Voting Rights Act (which mandates the drawing of majority-minority districts where possible), and districts must be geographically contiguous. The guidelines are that districts should be geographically compact and, where possible, avoid splitting “communities of interest.”5 The concept of a community of interest is vital to the Commission’s mandate—per the California Constitution, communities of interest are “populations that share common social and economic interests.” This definition is intentionally vague, and could cover everything from political boundaries (city/county limits, neighborhoods, etc.) to ethnic groups or areas that share a similar type of employment. Finally, the commission is completely banned from using or viewing political data of any kind, which means they draw their maps without knowing which areas vote a particular way.

Attempts at making redistricting more fair in other states have largely focused on geographic compactness and not needlessly splitting up cities and counties— California’s decision to expand communities of interest to include less strictly-measurable associations is a revolutionary concept. T he vast majority of the Citizens’ Commission’s work is composed of holding hearings across the state to solicit public input to create a database on what actual citizens consider to be their “communities of interest.” Those testifying at these meetings can range from local public officials and business leaders to individual homeowners or commuters. While well-intentioned, the obvious potential flaw in this process is that partisan actors can provide testimony without disclosing their conflict of interest, potentially influencing the decisions of the CCRC. An investigation by FiveThirtyEight shows that while partisans do engage this tactic somewhat frequently, it has not noticeably impacted the commission’s decision making.6

With these rules and safeguards in mind, the setup of and concept behind the CCRC appears to be a robust way to create districts that are not only fair, but also allow for cohesive representation of various communities within the state. However, a promising concept does not automatically lead to successful implementation, and any evaluation of the Commission must include the actual outcomes of its first—and to date only—attempt at redistricting in 2011. Separate teams at UC Berkeley and the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California attempted to evaluate the CCRC’s final 2011 maps relative to their constitutional objectives, along with the previous maps drawn by the Legislature in 2001. Both studies showed relatively similar results: overall, the Commission-drawn maps split noticeably fewer cities and towns, with a full 91% of incorporated cities left completely intact.7 Furthermore, of the cities that were split, they were far more likely to be divided between just two districts, whereas the Legislature-drawn maps tended to crack them between three districts or more. Using an algorithmic model, they also found that the Commission-drawn districts were significantly more compact than the old Legislature-drawn ones. The studies also found that the Commission drew far more majority-minority and minority-opportunity districts than the Legislature. Interestingly, almost all of these new districts emerged between the release of the draft map in June and the final map in August 2011, indicating that public comments on the draft maps had a real impact on the Commission’s final choices.8 The last major finding was that the number of “competitive” districts (where the expected winning margin for either party is less than 10%) increased by about 10% for the State Senate and State Assembly maps, and 15% for the Congressional map. Overall, the studies both found that the Commission largely fulfilled its constitutional mandate while creating more competitive districts and noticeably increasing minority representation in the process. Following the publication of both studies, several longtime incumbents were defeated in primaries after the Commission demolished their districts, indicating that, at the very least, the CCRC did not deliberately protect incumbents like the Legislature did in 2001.9

While the empirical case for the Commission’s 2011 maps is strong, the CCRC is not without its detractors. The two most notable objections are that the maps benefit Democrats and that they still disadvantage certain minority groups.10 The first claim is largely without merit—California voters are heavily Democratic, and since Republicans in the state are largely clustered in a few areas, it would take a deliberate effort by the commission to draw more “Republican opportunity” districts, something they are explicitly not allowed to do. Furthermore, the commission did create more competitive districts, and while they largely benefited Democrats early in the decade, Republicans actually netted four of these seats in the 2020 elections. The claim about minority underrepresentation is more complicated, as the Commission uses estimates of voting age population rather than pure Census population data. Since minority communities in California skew younger and are more likely to be noncitizens, they are less likely to show up in this data. Indeed, when the Commission drew its maps in 2011, California’s Latino population overall stood at 37.6%, but only 25.6% of its voting-age citizen population. While this largely didn’t impact the racial makeup of the Representatives elected under the 2011 maps (California has one of the nation’s most diverse US House delegations), the 2021 Commissioners are taking the concerns seriously, as their draft maps contain a nearly 50% increase in majority-minority districts and would create the nation’s first majority-Asian congressional district.11 Overall, most major criticisms of the Commission are of factors it cannot control and, where it does, are factors the Commission typically makes a very deliberate effort to correct.

Despite its drawbacks, the California Citizens’ Redistricting Commission is a promising example of how to lessen the prevalence and impacts of partisan gerrymandering. While removing the process from the hands of lawmakers requires the willingness to sacrifice some accountability and transparency, California’s experiment shows that, with the proper safeguards in place, it is possible to create a truly independent commission that, while not perfect, creates maps much more representative of a state’s population than any political actor could.12 Indeed, Idaho, Montana, Arizona, Colorado, and Michigan have all empowered their own fully independent redistricting commissions, many with similar guidelines to those of California.13 Only time will tell if these commissions create fairer maps, but those seeking to end partisan gerrymandering should continue to look to the California Citizens’ Redistricting Commission—despite its flaws—as a model for how to draw relatively fair, compact, and nonpartisan districts.

Vincent Behnke Article

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