In the days prior to Christmas, two hastily called Judiciary committee hearings were called in an effort to change the NJ State Constitution, ensuring one party control of the State in perpetuity. Practically no notice was provided, no information was shared, no questions were answered and no experts testified. Regardless of your political leanings, anyone who favors open, transparent, good government should reject what transpired. So far the Star Ledger and the Daily Record editorial boards have denounced this political gamesmanship. Below please find an Op Ed piece regarding this issue.
Lame Duck Redistricting Scheme Raises More Questions than It Answers
By Assemblyman Michael Patrick Carroll and Assemblywoman Holly Schepisi
Schemes hatched in lame duck sessions of the Legislature should always give reason for pause, but changing voting rights without considerable public discussion is reckless. A proposed constitutional amendment with a significant but unknown impact on the voting rights of New Jersey’s citizens deserves more than the hasty, slapdash, non-transparent treatment the Democrats are giving this measure.
Ignoring the Legislature’s responsibility to hold fact-finding hearings, Chairman John McKeon dismissed concerns about fast-tracking the proposal changing the way the state redraws its legislative districts. “The people of New Jersey will have the opportunity to vote on whatever is on the ballot,” he said at last week’s Assembly Judiciary Committee hearing.
We did not support this plan in part because the sponsors couldn’t answer basic questions. How can voters make an informed decision about a constitutional amendment when the Legislature itself does not fully understand it?
What’s the rush? Legislative districts won’t be reconfigured again until 2021. When the 1966 Constitutional Convention considered the standards used today, it met for three months and had 14 meetings full of expert testimony. Additionally, there were six meetings specifically on apportionment. In this process, the Democrats are advancing a plan after only two brief committee meetings with no expert testimony and only one member of the public commenting.
Their amendment relies on a decades-old report by Dr. Donald Stokes, who served on the Apportionment Commission in 1981 and 1991. Many of his assumptions are based on demographics from almost a generation ago. No one can deny that New Jersey has changed significantly in a quarter century. Does Stokes’ modeling still hold true? Were the demographics he used in 1993 accurate on what we know today?
The amendment deviates from the report on even more critical aspects. Stokes used legislative elections to create his models and proposal, but this amendment ignores them. Instead, it relies on federal and gubernatorial elections that have little to do with drawing up legislative districts. Why exclude legislative races to determine how those districts should be drawn? That’s like using baseball statistics to figure out how football should be played.
Their plan requires only a quarter of districts to be competitive, but allows the remaining 75 percent to have no contest at all. Why not maximize the number of competitive districts? The Stokes test for determining whether a map is fair requires the popular vote across the state to be represented among the districts as a whole and be responsive to the shifts of public opinion. When electoral tides move strongly toward one party, that party should fairly quickly win an effective majority of seats. Using the 2011 legislative election returns, a fair map should have resulted with 21 Democrat and 19 Republican Senators, rather than the 24-16 split that has remained since that election.
Further, the amendment intentionally excludes the equal representation requirement in the state Constitution. Every state respects equal population requirements, the bedrock of American democracy since “no taxation without representation.” Yet, the Democrats intentionally left it out in favor of gerrymandering districts, which almost always shift groups of voters to limit the voting rights of others. They may point to the compactness requirement in the constitution, but this amendment makes federal law pre-eminent.
Why do the sponsors want to make this change? Democrats have held a legislative majority since 2001 and hold their largest majority in 40 years.
The plan was conceived behind closed-doors by Democratic political operatives with essentially a super PAC in East Brunswick. They introduced it to the Assembly Judiciary Committee on November 17, even though it was not mentioned during a previous meeting just three days earlier. With little more information than a Politico article, it passed on a party-line vote the week before Christmas.
By the end of the next day, the Democrats wanted to limit the number of members on the redistricting commission in their plan without explanation. They called the committee back the following Monday, but that meeting started four hours late after most of the media and public left. This contempt for transparency and lack of serious inquiry into this proposal’s ramifications is striking and should be a matter of serious concern to anyone who values New Jersey’s voting rights.
While parties may disagree on the result of the map every ten years, New Jersey’s electoral process has been routinely praised by academics when compared to other states. Why weren’t those experts invited to the committee hearing? Shouldn’t we know what other states do before moving forward with a constitutional amendment? Surely if this plan were all the Democrats say, there would have been a line of academics ready to back them up.
In no other profession would you first enact a policy to know what is in it. The lack of information, transparency and candor is reason enough to be concerned with where the state is headed under a Democratic majority. This constitutional amendment blindly leads the public into forever changing the way New Jersey votes.
