President’s Message
Every ten years, following the completion of the U.S. Census and using the new census data, states redraw their state and congressional district lines. On April 29, the League of Women Voters launched a national campaign, People Powered Fair Maps™, to ensure that this constitutionally mandated process of reapportionment produces congressional districts that secure equal representation—one person, one vote.
These districts determine how communities are represented at the local, state, and federal levels. Where the district lines are drawn determines how effectively our government works for us, whose voice is heard, and how much your vote counts. Redistricting (theoretically) ensures equal representation. It creates districts that have nearly the same number of people in them, determines who appears on your ballot and where you can vote, and influences whether your elected officials will respond to your needs.
As we know, redistricting is vulnerable to gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is the process whereby those in political power intentionally manipulate the redistricting process to keep or increase their political power. This is accomplished through two distinct approaches. One is “packing” and the other is “cracking.”
Packing is consolidating communities likely to vote against the dominant party into one district, which gives that community only one representative in the legislature. Cracking is dividing the community across districts and ensuring that the community is always the minority and less likely to be adequately represented by their representatives.
Gerrymandering is generally fueled by incumbents trying to “protect” their seats and make sure their district maintains a majority of the vote and they can be reelected. Over time, this process of reducing the competitiveness of districts leads to depressed voter turnout and causes voters to lose faith in their ability to effect change. This is how voters and entire communities can be disenfranchised.
The redistricting process is such an important aspect of our representative democracy that I feel compelled to ask you to bestir yourself and TAKE ACTION! Please join our campaign to raise public awareness and support for achieving equitable political power. Go to the LWV-PA website today and sign up to join us in action.
We will continue our outreach to the community through the summer months to drum up interest and participation in redistricting. We are blessed to live in California and Los Angeles County, where redistricting is in the hands of citizens. Both the California Citizens Redistricting Commission and the L.A. County Citizens Redistricting Commission are requesting the public’s input to identify “communities of interest” that will be used to draw district lines. Please go to our website at https://my.lwv.org/california/pasadena and access our YouTube channel to find out what a “community of interest” is and how you can serve your community. While you’re at it, you can view the video of our April 29 Day of Action too.
I don’t want to close this message without mentioning the Derek Chauvin trial. On April 20, the day the verdict was rendered, I felt relief—guilty, guilty, guilty, on all three counts. The verdicts formed one drop in the bucket of justice. But that bucket seems to have a hole at the bottom with the lifeblood of Black Americans draining out. It is so difficult to understand why this continues to happen—why the law enforcement community continues to single out people of color to inflict violence and death for minor transgressions of the law.
Join our Social Justice Committee to take on systemic racism in policing. And please be sure to read the article on racial profiling in police stops in this issue of the Voter.
—Martha Y. Zavala
