I'm not a great fan of "The Gubernator", but I'm very happy, at first glance, with his attempt to end gerrymandering in California. As always, the devil will be in the details (and I'm a little wary of the notion of enforcing that no district can end up with more than a 7% difference in population between registered Democrats and Republicans), but the current situation is so badly corrupt that this can only be an improvement, even with a few implementation flaws.
Gerrymandering is, at its core, methodical disenfranchisement of opposing voters by the controlling party. The Supreme Court made it illegal to do this solely based on race, but it's still common practice to do so for political gain, and the courts have declined again and again to take a position on it. Once upon a time, there was enough political interest that this sort of thing at least caused a public relations stink, and was done quietly; recently, it's grown so blatant that there's not even a pretense of it being anything other than a power grab. Usually, this is done by a single party (and the recent rise to dominance of the Republican Party owes much of its success to gerrymandering), but in 2000, there was a very strange occurrence in California.
Democrats and Republicans agreed to lock the votes.
As a result, only five out of eighty Assembly districts, and two out of 39 Senate district seats are ever really up for re-election; the remaining districts were drawn in such a way that there is a dominating majority on one side or the other, and elections there are nothing more than a polite fiction to preserve the illusion of democracy. What this does is remove any pressure whatsoever on a Congressman to represent the interests of the citizens in those areas belonging to a different political party. Politicians have chosen their voters, not the other way around.
As a result, both Democrats and Republicans are screaming at Schwarzenegger over this, and it is thus all the more remarkable that the man has tried to restore the democratic process. I hope he gets away with it, and I hope it encourages similar legislation elsewhere.
