Voice for Democracy

Newsletter of Californians for Electoral Reform

Winter 2006

Too Few Legislators

Editor’s note: CfER has not taken a position on increasing the size of the state legislature, as advocated by Sacramento City College and Cosumnes River College faculty member Heather Barbour in this article. Food for thought: would this proposal make the adoption of proportional voting easier by allowing multimember districts to cover smaller geographical areas than they would if the legislature remains the same size?  Or does it compete with proportional voting by emphasizing the number of citizens represented by each legislator and the geographical size of districts?

Americans have long understood that the structure of government is inherently related to its outcomes. And our government was meticulously designed to ensure the protection of our most cherished political ideal: liberty. Yet a healthy discussion about liberty, and how to best design government structure to protect it, is the first thing that gets lost in the hustle and bustle of horserace politics that dominates public debate about political reform.

So as we move into the next phase of our conversation about political reform, specifically as it relates to legislative redistricting, we ought to return again and again to these fundamental questions: Is liberty threatened? By what dangers? What changes, if any, will advance freedom?

The most dangerous threat to liberty lies in the growing disconnect between the people, from whom all political authority comes, and the government. It is this condition we should fear and fix.

When representatives are released from the bonds that tie them to the people, the door to tyranny, the mortal enemy of liberty, opens wide.  Clearly, the link between represented and representative has stretched very thin in California. Surveys indicate that anywhere from a half to three-quarters of Californians believe state government does only a fair to poor job working for their interests. And only one in three Californians trusts Sacramento to do what is right always or most of the time. Voter participation, particularly in primary elections, has been dropping for nearly half a century.  Perhaps most importantly, 37 percent of nonvoters don’t believe voting makes a difference in the outcome of elections.

What else can it be called but tyranny--and how can liberty be safe--when the people do not trust their government, do not see themselves in it, do not participate in public life and do not think their voice would count if they did?

The redistricting debate has focused largely on who should be assigned to redraw political districts. But the cause of our political disconnect is not who draws district lines.  The cause of the disconnect is in the size of state legislative districts, not their shape. 

California, despite its booming population, has not adjusted the size of its legislative districts in more than 130 years.  When California was founded our total population was about 1 million. Today, a single state Senate district con­tains nearly this number. For comparison, that’s more people than live in 30 percent of the world’s countries or about the same population as Fiji or Delaware. 

The state Assembly is no model of representation either. Our 80 Assembly members represent 450,000 people each, more than triple the number in Texas, which has the second-largest lower house districts in the U.S. 

As a result of this population dilution, the power of an individual vote in Assembly elections has dropped by 98 percent!  If your vote was worth a dollar in 1879, it’s worth 2 cents now.

One representative for a half a million or more is not acceptable.  It invites corruption because large district campaigns are costly.  It forces citizens and interests with conflicting opinions to compete for a single vote, which invariably means less-powerful voices are silenced.  And it stretches representatives so thin they are often barely able to connect with engaged citizens, let alone the alienated.  These are the things that cause the disconnect.

If we are to put the people back in the driver’s seat of state government, we must ignore the temptation to get caught by the small questions we can easily answer--i.e. the make-up of the redistricting panel--and focus on the big question that is harder to answer:  how do we best reduce state legislative districts to human scale so that individual citizens once again have a meaningful level of control and accountability in elections?   It’s not about whether or not your representative is in the same party as you; it’s about whether or not you and a few friends can, with a reasonable amount of time and money, boot him or her out.

Individual liberty will not survive a government of the few, for the few and by the few. Rather than undertake a bruising redistricting battle that holds, at best, the potential for only small gains, we out to focus energy on the more seri­ous threat to liberty: large legislative districts. For when individuals lose the ability to influence their representatives, representation becomes meaningless and liberty is reduced to sound bite status.

Heather Barbour