With Friday’s passage of yet a third redistricting amendment, GOP legislators in Tallahassee hope to undermine the will of 1. 7 million Floridians who are demanding fairer elections. So says the group FairDistrictsFlorida whose members gathered each one of those 1.7 million petition signatures in order to get two amendments on the November ballot that will set new ground rules for the redistricting game.
Ellen Freidin, campaign chair of FairDistrictsFlorida says voters will have an opportunity to make a very significant change in Florida that will “end to a great degree, the horrible partisanship that has been grid locking our state and create fairer elections for all Floridians.”
The intent and language of the two Fair Districts amendments is simple and straightforward; to end the gerrymandering of congressional districts that favors the political party that’s drawing the maps. Districts could not be drawn to favor any incumbent or political party or deny minorities from having equal access to the political process. They’d also have to be drawn as compact as possible, unlike District 12 from which this reporter hails, that encompasses patchwork pieces of Hillsborough County, a sliver of Osceola and most of Polk County.
During a recent Tallahassee press conference blasting the GOP proposal, Senator Dave Aronberg said if anyone knows about gerrymandering, he does because his District (27) sprawls from West Palm Beach all the way to Bonita Springs on the east coast. He joked “it is the true gerrymander, I can wake up in the morning and watch the sun rise in my district and also watch the sun set in my same district.”
The initiatives are not sitting well with Tallahassee Republicans. Once Amendments 5 and 6 made the ballot, they went to work on a competing amendment they say is needed to maintain “communities of interest”. The effort was led by GOP Senator Mike Haridopolos who said that African American and Hispanic congressional members have told him they have “great concerns that if this thing passes that it will reduce the number of minority seats in Congress”; people like Orlando Senator Gary Siplin and Al Lawson of Tallahassee, members of the state’s Legislative Black Caucus.
The two democrats crossed party lines to the ire of their colleagues and voted for the so called ‘clarifying’ amendment put forth by Haridopolos which says in part “districts and plans are valid if the balancing and implementation of standards is rationally related to the standards contained in the state constitution and is consistent with federal law”.
This article appears in May 5-11, 2010.