New York's redistricting failures need to be reformed

Every past New York State redistricting had winners and losers based on who was in power. This year New York State government produced, regrettably, the kind of electoral lines insiders bargained for and good government advocates feared.

The three sets of new maps for federal and state elections approved last week by the State Legislature, and now challenged in court, do show improvements on the fairness front. Those came largely from the State Senate’s Democratic majority countermanding blatant gerrymanders imposed 10 years ago by their GOP predecessors, who expanded the house to 63 seats in a bid to preserve power.

As Long Island activists urged in hearings months ago, the largely minority hamlets of Brentwood in Suffolk County and Elmont in Nassau were newly united in the 3rd and 7th Senate districts, respectively, under the aegis of "communities of interest." Some of the same was accomplished in Senate and Assembly lines that affect Asian American and Latino communities in Queens and Brooklyn.

But the civic piety of empowering communities seemingly faltered when Senate Democrats wrote largely conservative voters from the Five Towns, with its close-knit Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods, into a Queens-based district.

For Long Island, this needless dilution should remind us that important communities of interest are not only social and ethnic but governmental — in the form of counties, towns, and school districts.

Dividing local jurisdictions can cause distortions. Proper redistricting, which demands compactness and uniformity, is an intrinsically tense process. Communities of interest are a matter of balance, not preference.

DEMOCRATIC DRAWINGS

The Democratic Party’s supermajorities in Albany showed their clearest partisanship in congressional districts. This year’s searing national campaign for control of the House of Representatives clearly motivated them.

To help reduce "safe" GOP seats, the legislature’s map-masters fiddled on Long Island by placing Long Island Sound in the middle of a newly absurd, five-county CD3, allowing them to make Rep. Lee Zeldin’s CD1 an 85-plus-mile-long east-west contrivance that's friendly to Democratic candidates. CD2 becomes a collection basin to contain Island Republicans.

Demographics drove the overall changes. The population thinned upstate and increased downstate, and the U.S. Census reapportionment eliminated one of New York’s 27 seats.

That's where we are on redistricting — but not where we should stay.

The legislative majorities in Albany took a free hand on the maps because they could. The bipartisan Independent Redistricting Commission deadlocked on presenting a unified set of lines to be considered and voted on by lawmakers under a process prescribed in the state’s 2014 constitutional amendment. It was flawed in concept.

In August, less than a month before commission negotiations appeared to break down, Gov. Kathy Hochul took office and was asked in an interview whether she would use her influence to help Democrats expand the House majority through redistricting.

"Yes," she said. "I am also the leader of the New York State Democratic Party. I embrace that. I have a responsibility to lead this party, as well as the government."

That was fine talk for the ex-congresswoman from Buffalo as a still-new party leader. It's not fine for her role as government leader. As expected, she quickly signed off on the maps Thursday, prompting a GOP lawsuit to stop them.

CONSTITUTIONAL QUANDARY

Legal provisions, other than the rules of how the commission would operate, were approved in 2014. The state constitution required for the first time that "districts shall not be drawn to discourage competition or for the purpose of favoring or disfavoring incumbents or other particular candidates or political parties."

Now a group of Steuben County plaintiffs led by ex-GOP Sen. George Winner charge that Albany Democrats violated that new legal mandate. They said it happened, in part, when party elected officials "undermined" the commission by "encouraging" fellow Democrats on the panel to stop negotiating a unified plan, allowing last week's partisan process.

Whether or not this succeeds in state court, the case again points up critical design flaws in what was at first going to be a truly detached process.

The League of Women Voters — surely no foe of either major party — cited the seven-year-old gerrymandering ban to say the maps "reflect a Legislature that appears to care more about favoring partisan interests than it does for fair maps."

The law says districts cannot be crafted to aid or hurt incumbents or curb competition. But Michael Li of the Brennan Center for Justice credibly said that in the maps, "New York spreads Democratic voters a lot in order to take out Republican incumbents." Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, called the apparent gerrymanders "a major disservice to the voters."

Hochul now must respond to that nonpartisan criticism by explaining specifically how she thinks the most glaring manipulations — such as giving her more-than-likely November opponent Zeldin's CD1 a new blue paint job — should be accepted as fair or necessary.

Before this is overtaken by events, she and the Legislature must go back to the drawing board to devise a new constitutional amendment for a real independent process free of built-in bipartisan deadlocks.

There's no dodging, in the long run, the bedrock principles of seeking sensible, evenly-populated and competitive districts, all of which would add up to future fairness.