(Above, Inset: l-r): Alvaro Hernandez, Executive Director of the California Citizens Redistricting Commission; Paul Mitchell, Owner of Redistricting Partners and Vice President of Political Data, is a national expert on redistricting and demographics; Sara Sadhwani, Commissioner for the California Citizens Redistricting Commission, Assistant Professor of Politics, Pomona College, specializing in American politics, racial and ethnic politics; and Linda Akutagawa, California Redistricting Commissioner, President and CEO of LEAP (Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics). (Siliconeer/EMS)

Redistricting is underway across the country, the once every decade process, when states redraw electoral boundaries to keep pace with population shifts, and to ensure equal representation at all levels of government.

Nationwide, redistricting experts predict that deepening political polarization is leading partisan legislators to seek to reduce competitive voting districts in favor of districts that will be safe for their party.

Sandy Close, Director of Ethnic Media Services said, “As David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report told The Washington Post, the decline of competitive seats will only lead to a more extreme and dysfunctional congress.”

California, which has pioneered efforts to reduce partisanship in the redrawing of lines and which, for the first time, will lose a congressional district based on slower population growth.

Where does California fit in the larger picture? How will California’s increasingly diverse ethnic groups ensure equitable representation in regions where no one group has a majority above all? Why is public input so important?

At a briefing of the California Citizens Redistricting Commission and Ethnic Media Services, Oct. 11, speakers – Paul Mitchell, Owner of Redistricting Partners and Vice President of Political Data, national expert on redistricting and demographics; Sara Sadhwani, Commissioner for the California Citizens Redistricting Commission, Assistant Professor of Politics, Pomona College, specializing in American politics, racial and ethnic politics; Linda Akutagawa, California Redistricting Commissioner, President and CEO of LEAP (Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics); and Alvaro Hernandez, Executive Director of the California Citizens Redistricting Commission – answer these questions, as the process of math drawing unfolds.

The California Citizens Redistricting Commission will dedicate the next few weeks to reviewing geographic areas for potential district ideas. Using the multitude of communities of interest testimony, the Commission received throughout the summer, they are assessing how that testimony could potentially inform district boundaries and considering the tradeoffs that will need to be made in eventual maps. The Commission welcomes your input as they visualize potential community groupings for the maps they will redraw (Congressional, State Senate, Assembly and Board of Equalization). Submit your input using a new tool here: https://airtable.com/shrQDD2ta2emnSzzO.

Readers can also use mapping tools at: https://drawmycalifornia.org/

Hernandez introduced the two commissioners, and the independent California Citizens Redistricting Coalition.

“These two commissioners are emblematic of the what the intent was of the voters, when they created this statewide redistricting commission, to put people with expertise, community experience and not political interests, in charge of drawing districts,” said Mitchell.

“The commissioners are not partisan. There are democratic, and republican, and independent commissioners, but they, like the prior commission, are not democratic, republican actors, but they are largely focused on a lot of the issues that are going to be important – social justice and and protecting minority communities – there’s a lot of focus on that in the work that they’re doing.

“Right now, they’re kind of going around the state, bumping into walls, trying to figure out what works, looking at these visualizations of different parts of the state,” said Mitchell.

“In California, there are huge challenges before this commission. They’re fortunate, they’re not having to undo a huge gerrymander like the last commission was doing, but they do have challenges even within the existing districts that they kind of inherited from the last commission,” said Mitchell.

“California had a lower rate of growth than the rest of the country, and that rate of growth can differ around the state, which creates vacuums in some places, and other places that have an abundance of population. The rules of the game have changed with the elimination of section 5 of the Federal Voting Rights Act.

There are ways in which it potentially could allow them to draw better districts for minority populations.

“There are increased Latino populations throughout the state, really increased Asian populations particularly in the most Asian communities and a dispersion of Black population. “The Black population has grown in California, but more of it is moving out to Riverside, or Elk Grove, or different parts of the state, as opposed to the Asian communities, that are really growing most heavily within those already high Asian population areas. These distinctions between populations by region and county that are going to have a big impact on the final lines nationally,” said Mitchell.

“We also have local redistricting in California – the Fair Maps Act – that takes a lot of elements of the statewide redistricting rules and move them down to local government, for example it makes it unlawful for a local government to draw districts based on partisan outcomes or political parties; it makes it harder for them to draw districts just based on where incumbents live; and in addition there are many agencies that are converting from at-large elections to bi-district elections using the California Voting Rights Act,” said Mitchell.

“Just because we’ve changed these laws, doesn’t mean that we’ve eliminated some of the gerrymandering that we might see in local redistricting. Minority voting rights is a key concern in the redistricting process,” said Mitchell.

“Two Asian communities aren’t cohesive, they could be all under the same category of Asian based on the Census, but they vote differently. They might not be considered a majority-minority district, or a Voting Rights Act district in other places, and this becomes more subtle. You need to be able to draw districts to protect minority voting rights where there are not those voting rights act protections, in those cases you need to identify communities by other characteristics, by language, by culture, by amenities, by services they use, and there’s a lot of that happening throughout the state,” said Mitchell.

“There are other communities of interest as well – interest of renters and homeowners; people live in hillsides; the LGBTQ community; environmentalists; and people who are in struggling schools – any number of different kinds of communities of interest, and the idea in the state law is to draw them into districts, where they can affect the outcome of an election, or they can have better representative or voting power,” pointed Mitchell.

How do we define communities of interest?

“My favorite description is somebody said that a community of interest are people who are getting screwed over by their government, and the idea is that a community of interest is a set of people who have issues before their local or state government that is a shared interest and when they’re divided into multiple districts, they can’t get what they need. It could be housing, it could be healthcare, it could be education, it could be jobs, but when you’re dividing their community, you ruin their political voice,” said Mitchell.

According to Mitchell, gerrymandering is prevalent.

“What does it take to have elected officials actually be responsive to the communities that they serve? We hear so many stories about politicians who really don’t listen too much to the communities that they serve, and are self-interested, and out in the world for their own betterment. Yet, we know that communities have real needs, and before my life in academia, I worked for many years in social justice organizations. Working on immigration reform and other civil rights, and social justice issues at organizations, and concerns of communities on the ground mattered to me, and I felt that, in combination with my understanding of data and analysis, is something that I could bring to the table, and hopefully bring California a step closer to more responsive representation by the leaders who represent us,” said Commissioner Sadhwani.

“Right now, we are in the midst of a process of reviewing communities of interest testimony and comparing that to the population totals that we have. We offered sessions and numerous different languages so that communities could call in and speak to us in their native tongue and that we could understand the needs that they saw on the ground.

“We’re in a process of thinking about what we’re referring to as visualizations of what what’s possible for the state of California.

“Taking that communities of interest testimony that we received over the summer and matching it with the newly released census data to get a better understanding of exactly how many people live in those areas that were identified by communities on the ground, this isn’t meant to be districts themselves, but instead to hopefully inform future districts that we’re going to draw one of the key pieces. Our first criteria in drawing and redrawing the lines for the state is equal population,” said Commissioner Sadhwani.

“We moving away from the majority-minority to multi-minority districts and what will that mean to reduce inter-ethnic racial tensions? Will it improve that?” asked Sandy Close.

There are coalition districts where you might have multiple minority communities that vote cohesively in some elections, as an example, where I grew up in Glendale, like south of the 134 in Glendale, where you have a lot of ranchers down around the Glendale Galleria, historically, the Latino and Armenian communities can be more cohesive in their voting patterns in that part of Glendale, so theoretically you could have a coalition district there,” said Mitchell.

“When you actually look at races, where there’s an Armenian and a Latino on the ballot together, racially polarized voting just pops out again. Around California, I haven’t seen any places where we’ve said – Hey! there’s this coalition district between Latinos and Asians, or African Americans, or others, they are a single majority-minority district that I’ve seen around California,” said Mitchell.

“California is on the leading edge of these issues. It is a majority-minority state with extraordinarily complex racial demographics and complex, that in turn leads to complex political dynamics and complex elections. This is going to be an issue that more states will need to take on in the future. The other key piece that the Census data has shown us is that there’s also a large and growing proportion of people who identify with more than one race. In the long run we will need to think what it means to create majority-minority districts with multiple racial groups. I just don’t think we’re there yet,” said Commissioner Sadhwani.

On being asked about the multiethnicities challenge in the Orange County area, Commissioner Akutagawa said, “I think in places like northern Orange County, like Brea and Fullerton, that area also borders LA County, and their spillover in terms of some of the Asian communities between northern Orange County and that southeastern LA County area that includes places like Diamond Bar, Roland Heights and Hacienda Heights, we’ve been getting a lot of input from those areas too and sometimes they’re not all the same. People have different perspectives and those are all the visualizations that we’re just trying to see what if and then eventually we’re going to start narrowing it down once we get more of the racially polarized voting and voting rights act data. I would encourage anybody to follow us. Keep listening to what we’re saying, because when we know, you’ll know.”

How does public testimony affect your thinking?

“I’m in the rooms with the commissioners and in some instances it’s not all public redistricting like we see for the state of California. Sometimes it’s commissioners in smaller groups and they definitely hear the public, they definitely are trying to take the things that they get from public input and piece those together to figure out what a district should look like. They sometimes do have a critical lens for the army of people coming over with cut and paste testimony. They have a critical lens for people who are trying to manipulate the process.

“On the other side, I also work for organizations that are trying to affect the outcomes of elect of the redistributing process.

“You’ve seen these articles about people sending in fake testimony, that has been nothing that has been coming out of any of our clients. All of our client work that’s been trying to influence the registering process in in the state of California and local jurisdictions has been groups like Equality California, or CLCV, or other groups, that are speaking directly to the commission with a focus on what their communities of interest are. Doing it all in their own names, and I think that that makes their input much more powerful than just the person who walks the dog of the congressman, calling in and submitting testimony,” replied Mitchell.

Adding to Mitchell’s comment, Commissioner Sadhwani said, “Community testimony is essential to our process. It is a part of our mandate to go out and solicit community input. We have numerous formats in which people can submit information to us. We have a mapping tools where people can draw out their communities as well as a mapping tool where people can provide examples of the districts that they might like us to see. We even have a live feed where, in our meetings, you can write to us, and we can see a scrolling live feed of input that we’re receiving. We spent probably hundreds of hours this summer listening to people call in to provide their communities of interest testimony so we take public testimony very, very seriously. Of course, we have our eyes wide open and are using that critical lens to ensure that all voices are heard but it’s absolutely essential to our process.”

Commissioner Akutagawa also chimed in, “Whether you call in, or whether you write in via email, or use the tool, or any of those things, all of that is equal and important. It’s not just calling in that you’re going to get our attention. I think the written testimony is equally as important and we do want to hear it. What’s important is that as the 14 commissioners, we represent Californians, and we’re going to come with our knowledge of our particular areas or the areas in which we’re each being assigned. I know Orange County, and I grew up in in the San Gabriel valley. I may know those areas however what I see and what somebody else sees in Orange County or in in the San Gabriel valley may be very different. I think this is where the nuances that community input gives us is going to be very important.

“Communities that are densely packed like LA and Orange County, where the Asian and Latino communities, in particular, are very interspersed within each other, it’s not like you could just cleanly say, okay let’s just cut it here. It’s not as simple as that even though you could make some blocks. It’s not as simple as that and that’s throughout California.

“This is one of the few activities civic activities that anybody can input in and tell us what you think what you want to see and it’s important that we get your testimony especially on the areas in which you live, where you work, where you play, because you know your communities.

“When we look at our democracy this is one of the few ways in which we can have a way to ensure that our democracy stays strong by drawing fair maps that represent our communities in the best way possible, and doesn’t disenfranchise anybody, but we can only do that when we hear from our fellow Californians.”