The TBD details on California’s redistricting special election

election law and constitutional law, political parties, redistricting, The Voting Wars

Justin here. Today, California Gov. Newsom announced what he’d been foreshadowing for a while now — an effort to seek voters’ approval for new congressional district lines in a Nov. 4 special election. (Rick noted the border patrol “escort” for the press conference. I can’t help note that the Japanese American National Museum – for those who haven’t been, it’s got a tremendously powerful series of exhibits on the WWII internment — is a little on the nose as a backdrop for a militarized show of force at a political event.)

The exact contours of the legislative package to make the redistricting initiative happen probably won’t be crystal clear until the legislature gets back next week. But among the pieces I’ll be watching:

  • Timing. Current law seems to say that the governor can call a special election 148 days out. The legislature, of course, can change that law — and it’ll have to in order to hit a November 4 special election target (82 days away from today). (That timing provision can be changed by statute, I believe – the date change doesn’t have to itself go on the ballot.) I’ll be looking for whether this is a one-time only change or whether there are more general conditions for the exception.
  • Funding. Part of the reason for leaving time before a special election is to give election officials the runway they need to run the thing . As Doug Chapin used to hammer home on the regular — fast, accurate, cheap: pick any two. This schedule will be fast, and the results have to be accurate. I’ll be looking to see who’s picking up the extra tab for the pre-election prep overtime.
  • Substance. The best reading of the state constitution is that maps are drawn by an independent commission, once per decade. That authority can be changed with a ballot initiative. But the reporting says that Newsom also plans to “put a new map” in front of voters on Nov. 4. The change to authority has to be in the constitution, but I imagine the map would be an initiated statute (and not itself constitutionalized). There’s nothing inherently weird about having both a constitutional change and a statutory change in the same measure — the proposition to put the commission in place in the first instance combined the two. But a single initiative to both change the process and pass a new specific map has some risks under the state’s single-subject rule. Two separate initiatives create questions about what happens if the electorate passes one but not the other. I’ll be looking to see how the package resolves those questions.
  • Additional constraints. Article XXI is the part of the state constitution that gives authority to the commission. It also has a bunch of other constraints, procedural and substantive. If the new initiative is effectively a temporary contingent carveout, how temporary? What’s the threshold of the contingency? How complete a carveout? Texas has essentially no state rules for drawing congressional districts – the only rules are the few rules in federal law. For its response, does California do the same?
  • Additional triggers. Newsom has said that California will respond to Texas in the maps he puts forward. I’m told that California and Texas aren’t the only two states in the Union. If another state says that it’s re-redrawing its maps to respond to California, does the initiative include provisions for re-re-redrawing the maps to respond to the response? Does the initiative include a provision allowing for later legislative amendment of the (presumably statutory) map?

Lots still TBD here.

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Annals of Authoritarianism: Trump’s Military Agents Appear Outside California Governor Gavin Newsom’s Press Conference on Redistricting Reform

authoritarian threats in US

Truly frightening stuff:

As Gov. Gavin Newsom prepared to announce that he would take on President Trump’s redistricting plans on behalf of California, scores of federal immigration agents massed outside the venue Thursday.

Newsom was set to speak at the Japanese American National Museum in downtown Los Angeles, when Border Patrol Sector Chief Greg Bovino, who has been leading the immigration operations in California, arrived in Little Tokyo, flanked by agents in helmets, camouflage, masks and holding guns.

“We’re here making Los Angeles a safer place since we won’t have politicians that’ll do that, we do that ourselves,” Bovino told a Fox 11 reporter in Little Tokyo. “We’re glad to be here, we’re not going anywhere.”

When the reporter noted that Newsom was nearby, Bovino responded, “I don’t know where he’s at.”

Newsom’s office took to X to share that agents were outside, posting: “BORDER PATROL HAS SHOWED UP AT OUR BIG BEAUTIFUL PRESS CONFERENCE! WE WILL NOT BE INTIMIDATED!”

The apparent raid Thursday, during which one person was detained, comes amid calls from elected officials for an end to renewed immigration operations across the L.A. area. Federal agents have carried out a string of raids over the past week, arresting several people at car washes and Home Depot stores….

In a press conference outside of the museum following the operation, Mayor Karen Bass said, “there’s no way this was a coincidence.”

“This was widely publicized that the governor and many of our other elected officials were having a press conference to talk about redistricting, and they decided they were going to come and thumb their nose in front of the governor’s face. Why would you do that? That is unbelievably disrespectful, it’s a provocative act,” Bass said.

“They’re talking about disorder in Los Angeles,” the mayor said, “and they are the source of the disorder in Los Angeles right now.”

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“The Dangers of America’s Gerrymandering Problem—And How to Fix It”

redistricting

Benjamin Schneer and Maxwell Palmer in TIME:

Instead, we believe it is possible to make reforms that keep the current electoral system while also overcoming some of its flaws. We’ve developed a process-based solution that has a number of appealing properties. It’s inspired by the problem parents face when dividing a cake between two children. How can they make sure everyone gets an equal slice? One child cuts the cake in two, and the other child chooses between the two pieces.

Our approach, which we call the “Define-Combine Procedure,” splits the map drawing process into two simple stages. First, one party divides the state into twice the number of needed districts—for example, 20 sub-districts for a state that needs 10 congressional seats. Then, the second party pairs those sub-districts into the final 10 districts. The result is a fairer map than either party would have drawn on its own. Instead of mutually assured gerrymandering, this approach leads to mutually assured representation.

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“The Racial Gap in Trust in Elections (and How to Close It)”

election administration

Laura Uribe, Kailen Aldridge, Thad Kousser, Kyshan Nichols-Smith, and Tye Rush have written this article in Political Science Quarterly (also a version here without a subscription). Here is the abstract:

While the contemporary conversation about trust in U.S. elections focuses on mistrust among white conservatives, we ask whether racial and ethnic minority groups also lack confidence in the integrity of the vote count. Is there an enduring gap along ethnoracial lines over trust in elections and, if so, what determines the magnitude of this gap? Grounding our theory in the literature on race and trust in institutions and elections, we outline hypotheses about the mechanisms of mistrust for minority groups. We use an original national survey as well as data from the Survey of the Performance of American Elections from 2012 through 2022. We find that Black and Native Americans have lower levels of trust in elections when compared to white Americans. Asian Americans are not statistically unlike whites in their level of trust, and the trust gap that exists for Latines is partially explainable by demographic characteristics such as education and income. We further demonstrate the profound importance of state voting laws: in states that impose high barriers to accessing the ballot, the gap between white and Black Americans’ trust in elections doubles in size, while in states with the most inclusive voting laws, the racial gap in trust disappears.

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