By Robert Robb | Arizona Republic
Opinion: Gerrymandering the state for race and competitiveness won’t improve general election choices.
The Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission is gerrymandering the state for race and competitiveness. The clamor is for them to do even more of it.
However, the exercise is in parts insidious, absurd and futile. This isn’t the way to fix what’s wrong with Arizona politics.
This is not to criticize the existing effort. Arguably it is required under the federal Voting Rights Act and the state constitutional initiative taking away redistricting from the Legislature and giving it to the commission, at least one step removed from the raw politics involved.
It’s an ugly premise for choosing candidates
As currently interpreted, the Voting Rights Act requires creating districts in which minorities predominate. And the direction, in number and concentration, always has to get larger, never smaller.
This in turn requires giving short shrift to common redistricting criteria, such as compactness and respecting other political boundaries, to sweep the requisite number of minorities into the requisite number of districts in which they predominate. In Arizona, Latinos are the main consideration. Native Americans to a lesser degree.
