Frank Hecker

Some people are fond of using the term “statist” to describe their political opponents. (I’ve never heard of anyone using it to describe themselves.) For example, in response to a HoCo Rising post on a fundraiser held by Howard County council member Courtney Watson, Bill Bissenas commented that both Watson and Guy Guzzone (her rumored opponent in the next county executive race) are “statists of the highest order,” in Watson’s case “despite [her] efforts to convince folks otherwise.” In response to which Dave Bittner asked Bill, “you use the term, ‘statist’ a lot. Could you define it for me?”

Bill provided his own answer, which basically amounted to an admonition to “look it up” and a recommendation to read the works of Mark Levin, Thomas Sowell, and Ayn Rand. I was going to provide my own answer in comments, but since it threatened to run long I’m posting it here. Needless to say, this is my own opinion and not an attempt to speak for Bill or anyone else.

If you go by the “ultimate authority” (i.e., Wikipedia), “statism” is simply “a term used by political scientists to describe the belief that, for whatever reason, a government should control either economic or social policy or both to some degree.” However I think in practice a lot of people use the term more loosely than that, to refer more generally to issues relating to the increased power, scope, and actions of government in lots of different areas, and in this context there are several dimensions of “statism” to contemplate.

While these dimensions are interrelated to at least some degree they are not identical, so people can cherry pick from them to suit their own political inclinations and goals. Here (in no particular order) are what I think are the major dimensions along which you could be “statist” (or not, as the case may be):

1. Supporting high (or at least higher) taxes. But you could lower taxes while at the same time raising government spending if you’re willing to run larger deficits (see items 3 and 6 below), like George W. Bush and lots of other politicians (“conservative” or otherwise) past and present.

2. Supporting such measures as warrantless domestic wiretapping and general interception of Internet traffic, attempts to achieve visibility into or even emergency control over private corporate networks, onerous security procedures for air travel, or general surveillance of suspect populations and groups without specific evidence of criminal activity or intent. For the most past these and related measures have had pretty much unanimous cross-party support since 9/11, with no signs of anything changing in the foreseeable future.

3. Supporting lengthy and expensive overseas military engagements and/or military spending that is arguably often in excess of the real needs of national security. See also item 2.

4. Engaging in “nanny-state” paternalism (see Bill’s past comments on Ken Ulman and the smoking ban in Howard County parks) and various types of interference in the private lives of citizens (see Rick Santorum and any number of other social conservatives in the GOP).

5. Promoting government interference in the economy and general market distortions of various types. This is generally considered to be a specialty of Democrats, but is far from unknown among Republicans, especially when done through targeted tax breaks and/or special protections for favored industries (e.g., copyright and other IP-related legislation).

6. Supporting high government spending and tolerating high deficits (which are often but not always associated with high spending). From a “statist” perspective this is considered especially bad if it’s spending on social programs that are at least partially redistributive in nature. Some exempt targeted tax breaks (which either raise taxes on the rest of us or increase deficits) and various corporate subsidies (see item 5) and/or high military and intelligence spending (see items 2 and 3) from being “statist”, although it’s not clear why they should get a pass here.

If you take items 1 through 6 together, I don’t think there’s a major national politician who’s not “statist,” except for Ron Paul. (And I suspect that even Paul has some “statist” tendencies here and there—though Paul supporters are free to disagree.) I suspect almost all (if not all) local Howard County politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, would also fail the “statist” test. In practice “statist” is often just used as a pejorative term for politicians and policies people disagree with—from that point of view it’s basically the new “liberal”.

Some people who use the term “statist” also come to what I think are silly conclusions, for example that Canada, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, etc., are “socialist” countries. Canada actually scores significantly higher than the U.S. on the 2012 Index of Economic Freedom produced by the Heritage Foundation, Denmark is practically tied with the US, and both Finland and Sweden are also ranked in the top 25 countries worldwide. These countries are not “socialist” by any reasonable definition (e.g., government control of the means of production); rather they are simply capitalist countries (some of them more capitalist than the U.S.) that have relatively high spending on social programs.

The bottom line is that I discount anyone who uses the term “statist” unless they happen to be principled libertarians and are consistent in their positions on each of the dimensions of “statism” I’ve outlined above. Which is not to say that I think principled libertarians are always or even mostly right in terms of either their policy prescriptions and how they reach their conclusions, but that’s a subject for another day.

As reported by the Howard County Times, county executive Ken Ulman “decided not to sign” the council redistricting bill passed by the Howard County Council by a 3-2 vote, and as a result the original plan proposed by the redistricting commission will become law (per the Howard County charter).

I’ll leave it to others to comment on the whys and wherefores of Ulman’s decision (except to say that he’s been taking a fair number of politically contentious stands for a man who supposedly wants to be elected governor). I will however note that this is not the first time a county executive has found himself in the middle of controversy relating to Howard County Council redistricting.

To review how we got to where we are: When the election of council members by district was originally approved by Howard County voters the associated charter changes left it up to the council to adopt district boundaries and didn’t explicitly mention a role for the county executive. (The charter also wasn’t explicit on whether districting legislation had to be done via a council bill or a council resolution; see below.) When the first district boundaries were specified (in 1986) J. Hugh Nichols, the county executive at that time, declined to sign the council legislation establishing the district boundaries out of deference to the council’s role.

When redistricting was next done (beginning in 1991, after the 1990 census) the then-county executive, Republican Charles Ecker, was much more involved, making suggestions to the council (which had a 3-2 Democratic majority), submitting his own redistricting plan, and eventually vetoing the plan passed by the council. After a lawsuit and a couple of years of acrimony Ecker signed a compromise plan approved by the council 4-1 with the support of Charles Feaga, one of the two Republican council members.

That traumatic experience led to the creation of a (supposedly) independent redistricting commission to create council district lines. However the way the commission was selected (with members chosen by both parties and a “tie-breaker” member chosen by the council) meant that its decisions would not be free of political controversy, and the associated charter language still allowed for the council to amend the commission’s plan (assuming of course that it could reach agreement on any such changes). In the round of redistricting after the 2000 census the council did indeed amend the commission’s plan (after some intra-party feuding among the council’s 3-2 Democratic majority), and the amended plan was signed into law by James Robey, the county executive at that time.

This round of redistricting was shaping up to be a repeat of the post-2000 round, with the council once again unable to resist the temptation to mess with the commission’s plan, and then finally passing a compromise plan (again accompanied by a split among the Democratic council members). However this time Ken Ulman summoned his inner Chuck Ecker and vetoed the plan. Note that I say “vetoed” rather than the euphemistic “declined to sign” because I believe that under the relevant charter provision (section 209(g)) what Ulman did was strictly speaking a veto (like Chuck Ecker originally and unlike Jim Robey) refused to let the council’s plan go into effect.

Whether this counted as a true veto or not is an interesting question. To quote from the charter:

(g) Executive veto. Upon the passage of any legislation by the Council, with the exception of such measures as may in this Charter be made expressly exempt from the executive veto, the same shall be presented within three calendar days to the County Executive for his or her approval or disapproval, and within ten calendar days after such presentation the County Executive shall return any such legislation to the Council with his or her approval endorsed thereon or with a statement in writing of his or her reasons for not approving the same. Upon approval by the County Executive, any such legislation shall stand enacted. Any such legislation presented to the County Executive and returned with his or her veto may be reconsidered by the Council. The County Executive’s objections shall be entered upon the Journal of the Council, and not later than at its next legislative session, the Council may reconsider the enactment thereof; and if two-thirds of the members of the Council vote in the affirmative, the legislation shall stand enacted. Whenever the County Executive shall fail to return any such legislation within ten days after the date of its presentation to him or her, the Administrator of the Council shall forthwith record the fact of such failure in the Journal and such legislative act shall thereupon stand enacted. …

As noted in an earlier Howard County Times story, the redistricting bill was passed by the council on March 5 and presented to Ken Ulman on Tuesday afternoon, March 6. The press release announcing Ulman’s decision states that he “will be returning Council Bill 57-2011 to the County Council on Monday, March 19, unsigned.”and by my reading of 209(g) this constitutes an explicit veto In general if Ulman in fact does absolutely nothing with respect to a council bill (i.e., if he were to “fail to return any such legislation within ten days after the date of its presentation to him or her”) then the council legislation in question will be automatically enacted.

However… in this case things are complicated because the council passed its redistricting bill so close to the March 15 deadline. I’m not 100% sure what would have happened if Ulman had simply sat on the bill and never explicitly returned it unsigned. The bill in question was approved on March 5, but the ten-days allowed for executive consideration actually starts when the bill is “presented … to the County Executive for his or her approval or disapproval,” and I’m not sure when exactly that occurred. As noted above Ulman won’t actually return the bill to the council until March 19, so it’s possible that the ten-day window doesn’t expire until then. By my reading of 209(g) the ten-day window for Ulman to sign or veto the bill would end on March 16, after the expiration of the deadline. Since Ulman didn’t actually return the bill on March 15, but merely announced his intention to do so, my opinion is that his action in sending the letter to the council wasn’t a true veto as defined by the charter.

Why didn’t Ulman simply do nothing whatsoever and let the clock run out on its own? Why explicitly return the bill to the council on March 19, given that the March 15 deadline for enactment of a redistricting bill and the March 16 deadline for executive action would have already passed? Perhaps Ulman wanted to avoid any ambiguity over whether or not the council’s plan had been rejected and forestall any possible legal controversies. If anyone reading this knows more about the technicalities or politics around this issue please post something in the comments section.

If the council had gotten its act together earlier then presumably there would have been time for the council to try again to pass an acceptable plan, and if that plan could get approval from at least four council members then Ken Ulman’s veto would have been overridden. By delaying so long the council essentially put Ulman into the driver’s seat when it came to council redistricting.

I should also note that Ken Ulman can thank Chuck Ecker for establishing the precedent that county executives can in fact veto do in fact have legal authority with respect to council-passed redistricting plans. Prior to Ecker’s veto and the subsequent lawsuit it was unclear whether the council could pass a redistricting via a council resolution (which is not subject to the county executive’s veto) or needed to pass it as a bill (which is subject to veto). County Republicans won the lawsuit filed as part of the early 1990s redistricting battle, as the judge in the case held that indeed redistricting plans needed to be enacted via bills, not resolutions.

(However note that per the charter the members of the redistricting commission are to be appointed by a resolution, not a bill, which among other things prevents a county executive of one party from rejecting redistricting commission members appointed by a council majority of another party.)

Finally, some shameless self-promotion: If you’re interested in the back story behind the current round of redistricting and why Howard County does council redistricting the way it does, check out my ebook Dividing Howard: A History of County Council Redistricting in Howard County, Maryland. The book covers all the above topics and lots more besides—it’s essentially a mini-history of Howard County politics from before the founding of Columbia to the early 21st century. To celebrate the conclusion of the current redistricting saga I’m reducing the price of the book to 99 cents; as before, I’m donating all royalties from sales of the book to the local charity Voices for Children, which recruits and trains volunteer advocates to represent the best interests of abused and neglected children in the Howard County Courts.

UPDATE: I’ve revised the section above discussing whether Ulman actions with respect to the redistricting bill constituted a true veto or not.

Last December I took the opportunity to review my Howard County-related blogging in 2010, and I thought it would be fun to repeat that for 2011, including presenting some site statistics and links to posts I think are worthy of note.

My biggest project of 2011 was my finishing my blog series on Howard County Council redistricting and publishing it as an ebook, Dividing Howard. My main goal in doing this was to learn how to create and self-publish an ebook, and having the material mostly already written made it relatively easy to do this; the goal of creating the book also motivated me to finish the series of posts. Given the specialized topic I expected that I’d be able to count the number of copies sold on the fingers of one or two hands, and that expectation has been met: As of today I’ve sold ten copies to people other than myself. Adding to that the three copies I bought myself in order to test the buying process, my total royalties thus far are $26.54; I’ve rounded up and donated $30 to Voices for Children.

As for regular old blogging, in 2011 I did a total of 42 Howard County blog posts (not counting this one), down from 57 in the latter part of 2010 after I started doing Howard County posts. That amounted to one post related to Howard County (even peripherally) every eight or nine days, considerably off last year’s pace of one every four days. My blog traffic was also down from 2010; the average number of views was about 56 views per day, compared to 70 per day in 2010, a 20% decrease. If this trend continues my blog will be attracting only one view a day in 2029.

Here’s a (somewhat selective) list of posts (or groups of posts) I published this year, with additional commentary as appropriate:

• Somewhat ironically for someone who’s not actually a libertarian, I did a number of posts on themes related to libertarianism and the free market, including a rant about Maryland’s discouraging the emerging industry of personal genetic testing, a look at free-market approaches to growing Maryland jobs, and some unsolicited advice to Ken Ulman as he (apparently) prepares to run for governor of Maryland. Widening my scope a bit I also looked at the so-called “bleeding heart libertarians” and the history of liberty.
• Closer to home, I published my somewhat fanciful ideas on reimagining Columbia’s village centers, reported on Chris Leinberger’s talk on walkable urbanism, discussed the old Rouse building as a symbol of Columbia, and pondered the question of whether I should donate to local charities.
• After finishing my history of Howard County Council redistricting I published some further thoughts on the general subject: I wondered what type of government Howard County would have had without Columbia, opined that the Howard County GOP outsmarted itself on council districts, explored why electing council members by one-party-dominated districts can hinder good governing, speculated whether redistricting can be done in a non-partisan way, and discussed whether we should revert to at-large council elections. I also contemplated the curious coincidences between the local elections of 1986 and 2010, and revisited one of my 2010 election predictions.
• Finally, in more personal blogging I bet that I could lose weight using the threat of a Newt Gingrich presidency as a goad (and subsequently lost that bet), plugged my math blog, and re-branded my main blog.

If you have an interest in continuing to read this blog in 2012, remember that you can see new posts as soon as they’re published by using Google Reader (or another RSS reader) to subscribe to the blog’s Howard County-specific RSS feed (http://frankhecker.com/category/howardcounty/feed/). You can also follow my tumblr if you have an interest in what I’m reading and bookmarking.

In my next post I’ll look forward to 2012 and what blogging-related projects I might undertake in the new year.

This is my fifth and final post in Dividing Howard week on my blog, as I discuss some topics related to my new book on the history of county council redistricting in Howard County, Maryland, and the broader events of Howard County politics from 1960 on. Previous posts discussed the role of Columbia in spurring creation of a county council, the struggles of Howard County Republicans under the council district system, the problems with gerrymandering of council districts, and whether it’s possible to make redistricting less political. In today’s post I consider whether it would be preferable to go back to the previous method of electing council members at large.

As I noted in my discussion of selectorate theory, as a general principle it makes sense to broaden as much as possible the pool of voters who can meaningfully participate in electing leaders, so that those leaders will need to put together winning coalitions that are a significant fraction of the total voting population. Once elected such leaders would then be more likely as a general matter to pursue policies of benefit to everyone and not just to a relatively small band of supporters.

That general principle would lead us to require that a council member attract votes from people all over the county, and not just from those living in a relatively small district. As described in the early chapters of Dividing Howard, Howard County’s first charter required council members to be elected at large (in fact, no other scheme was permitted at the time by Maryland’s constitution), and the first five county council elections (1969, 1970, 1974, 1978, and 1982) were at-large elections.

Why not revert to the original system? There are multiple objections I can think of that need to be addressed. The first objection is that districts are needed to ensure diversity of the council, usually interpreted as racial diversity. This is the same argument recently used in support of the proposal to elect Howard County school board members by districts instead of at large. It’s motivated by the fact that at-large elections have historically been used in many jurisdictions to dilute minority voting power, in particular to ensure (in combination with white bloc voting for white candidates) that no African-American candidates are elected to at-large positions even where African-Americans form a significant portion of the voting population. The question of whether this argument is relevant to Howard County has both a practical and a legal dimension.

Practically speaking I don’t believe that an at-large system would necessarily be disadvantageous to African-American or other minority candidates. C. Vernon Gray was elected as the first African-American council member in an at-large election in 1982, and today I have no doubt that someone like Calvin Ball would be able to win election to the council on an at-large basis. Maybe I’ve missed something, but in modern times Howard County just doesn’t appear to have had the type of racially-motivated bloc voting, especially white voters voting as a bloc to reject black candidates, that has been characteristic of many other jurisdictions.

As discussed in chapter 23 of Dividing Howard, in 2001 African-Americans were only 23% of the Council District 2 population, yet local activists saw that as no barrier to electing an African-American council member to replace C. Vernon Gray; as Jared Thornton noted at he time, “A lot of things about Columbia seem to be different from any other place. We don’t need a super-majority in Howard County.”¹

However whether (re)introducing at-large council elections would pass legal muster is an entirely different question. Changes made to the Voting Rights Act in 1982 (coincidentally, the year of Howard County’s last at-large council election) tightened up the criteria under which at-large schemes could be deemed discriminatory, and in particular did not require actual intention of discrimination. Thus even if racial motivations were not behind an effort to change council elections to be on an at-large basis, such a change could still face a legal challenge on racial grounds.

However in 2009 in Bartlett v. Strickland the U.S. Supreme Court held that the relevant provision of the Voting Rights Act affecting by-district vs. at-large elections did not apply unless minorities constituted an actual majority in the area in question. Since this is not the case in Council District 2 (or indeed in any council district in Howard County) it may be that a change back to at-large council elections would be relatively immune to legal challenges.²

Beyond its affect on racial and ethnic minorities, another issue with moving to an at-large election system is its effect on the balance between the Democratic and Republican parties in Howard County. It’s a common complaint today that Republicans are under-represented on the county council relative to their share of registered voters: As of the 2010 general election Democrats were about 48% of registered voters, Republicans 31%, and independents 21%, with Democrats thus having a 1.56-1 registration advantage over Republicans, equivalent to 61% and 39% shares respectively of voters registering with the two major parties.³

Looking at election data instead of registration data, in the 2010 general election Democratic council candidates collectively received about 56% of all votes cast for council candidates compared to 44% cast for GOP council candidates, with Democratic council candidates under-performing a bit based on the Democratic registration advantage. If the county council reflected this division then we should expect the GOP to have two seats instead of their current one.⁴

Would electing council members at large correct this situation? I suspect that it would not, unless it were combined with additional changes to the voting system. In the type of at-large elections held in Howard County, both in the past for county council and at present for the Board of Education, the top set of vote-getters (e.g., top five for county council) are elected. (Political scientists refer to this as a multi-member district plurality system.) In such a system parties can run slates of candidates, and if voters select candidates along party lines then it is possible that all candidates selected in an at-large election would be of a single party.

For example, in Howard County if the 55% of voters who voted for Democratic council candidates in the 2010 general election were instead to vote as a bloc for a Democratic slate of five candidates in an at-large election, no Republican council members would be elected at all. As described in chapter 5 of Dividing Howard, this is pretty much what happened in the last at-large council election in 1982, with Democrats winning all five council seats and the only GOP candidate (Charles Feaga) being shut out.

Correcting this situation, so that the party composition of the council better reflects the party composition of the electorate, would require not just the abandonment of council districts but also the introduction of a voing scheme for proportional or semi-proportional representation. To go back to the 1982 Howard County council election, being the only GOP candidate didn’t help Charles Feaga: The best Republican voters could do was to vote for Feaga only, and no other candidate; however since Democrats significantly outnumbered Republicans this was insufficient to counter the effect of Democrats voting a straight ticket for five Democratic candidates.

One way to address this issue is to allow voters to cast multiple votes for one candidate, so that, for example, a GOP voter in 1982 could cast five votes for Charles Feaga instead of one. This so-called cumulative voting system was actually considered for use in Worcester County, Maryland, back in the 1990s to address the discriminatory effects of an at-large system on black voters. Other possible systems would have people vote for parties (not candidates) and then allot council seats on the basis of the total vote received by each party (a party list system) or allow users to express preferences between candidates (e.g., a single-transferable vote or STV system).

My overall point is that an at-large system in and of itself, especially like the one previously used in Howard County, would not necessarily address the complaints that Howard County Republicans have about the current district system. Neither would a system that combined, say, five council members elected by districts with two at-large members. Electing two members at large would help ensure expansion of the set of voters able to select a council majority (in line with my discussion of selectorate theory in a previous post), but given the Democratic advantage in voter preferences it’s quite likely that the two at-large members would always be Democrats, converting the present 4-1 Democratic council majority into a 6-1 majority.

This simple fact is that no voting system is perfect or can be perfect, in the sense of correctly reflecting all voters’ preferences and not producing results that seem to be contradictory to common sense. If people want to reform the way Howard County Council candidates are elected (a goal with which I’m sympathetic) then they’ll need to take the time to properly sift through the alternatives and (most important) build a strong case to the people of Howard County as to why such a change is necessary. Recall from Dividing Howard that it took at least five years to convince voters to move from the previous commissioner system to a county executive and county council, and over ten years to convince voters to replace the at-large system with council districts. For anyone interested in avoiding having another round of council redistricting in 2021, the time to start working is now.

One reason I decided to write my series of blog posts on Howard County council redistricting was to provide a sense of perspective about the issue that I think is badly needed. One reason I turned the blog series into the Dividing Howard ebook was to make it available for future readers who might be interested in the topic when the next round of redistricting occurs. If you haven’t already bought a copy, while wait until 2021? Dividing Howard is only $2.99 from Amazon or Barnes and Noble, and all royalties go to the local charity Voices for Children, which recruits and trains volunteer advocates to represent the best interests of abused and neglected children in Howard County courts.

1. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a current figure for the African-American population of Council District 2, but based on a quick check of Census data for census tracts within District 2 I suspect the proportion of African-Americans in the district is about the same as in 2001, about one quarter; the highest proportion in any one tract is 35%. (I took the figures from the 2010 Census interactive population map.) In comparison, the current African-American population of Howard County as a whole is 17.5% (American Fact Finder, Table DP-1, Profile of General Population and Housing Characteristics: 2010, 2010 Demographic Profile Data).

2. A good review of the legal issues around at-large elections, including the effect of the 1982 changes to the Voting Rights Act, is “At-Large Electoral Systems and Voting Rights” by Sidney Hemsley. Unfortunately however it does not discuss Bartlett v. Strickland.

3. Registration data is from my Howard County general election turnout spreadsheet. This in turn is based on data from the Maryland State Board of Elections for 1988, 1990, 1992 (for all voters, the Democratic, Republican, Libertarian, and Alliance parties, and unaffiliated voters), 1994, 1996 (for all voters, the Democratic, Republican, Libertarian, Reform, Natural-Law, and Taxpayers parties, and unaffiliated voters), 1998, 2000 (for all voters, the Democratic, Republican, Libertarian, Reform, Green, and Constitution parties and unaffliated voters), 2002, 2004 (for all voters and broken down by party), 2006, 2008, and 2010.

4. In the 2010 Howard County general election Democratic council candidates collectively received a total of 57,131 votes compared to a total of 45,590 for all GOP candidates combined. The totals are based on the official results for the 2010 general election as published by the Howard County Board of Elections.

This is my fourth post in Dividing Howard week on my blog, as I discuss some topics related to my new book on the history of council council redistricting in Howard County, Maryland, and the broader events of Howard County politics from 1960 on. Previous posts discussed the role of Columbia in spurring creation of a county council, the struggles of Howard County Republicans under the council district system, and the problems with gerrymandering of council districts. In today’s post I discuss whether it’s possible to avoid gerrymandering by making redistricting a nonpartisan affair.

Drawing district lines, whether of council districts or congressional districts, is one of those mundane political processes that tend to get people excited only when something particularly egregious happens—for example, the 2003 redistricting controversy in Texas, when (among other things) Democratic members of the Texas legislature actually fled the state in order to deny Republicans a quorum to pass a redistricting plan for Texas’s congressional districts. The usual solution proposed at such times is to “take the politics out of redistricting,” for example by having it be done by an independent and ostensibly nonpartisan commission.

Iowa was a leader in this regard, having established by law in 1980 a special agency (the Legislative Services Bureau, now part of the Legislative Services Agency) to handle redistricting of Iowa congressional and state legislative districts. The process has run fairly smoothly since then, with the state legislature approving the plans as a matter of course (sometimes after one or two revisions); the LSA completed the 2011 redistricting process in less than three months, with the final plan enacted almost unanimously.¹

More recently in two separate referendums (in 2008 and 2010) the voters of California voted to have an independent Citizens Redistricting Commission draw up district lines for California legislative and U.S. congressional districts. The commission members are chosen randomly from a pool of people determined to have the necessary qualifications, with five slots reserved for Democrats, five for Republicans, and four for independents or members of other parties. Unlike Iowa, the commission itself makes the final decision on district lines, not the state legislature.

As described in chapter 19 of Dividing Howard, Howard County uses a separate redistricting commission to draw council district lines. The members of the commission are nominated by the two main parties’ Central Committees; no independents or members of other parties need apply. (A third party could gain representation, but it would have to attract at least 25% of the vote in the county executive race.) The county council then appoints the commission’s chair to provide a “tie-breaker” vote, so that in practice the work of the commission is controlled by whatever party has a majority on the county council; the council also has the opportunity to modify the redistricting plan proposed by the commission. (This happened in the last round of redistricting, and may happen in this one as well.)

Thus the Howard County redistricting commission doesn’t have the independence and nonpartisan nature that advocates of redistricting reform typically call for. The commission seems to have instead been created mainly as a way to avoid having the county council be involved in the detailed work of creating redistricting plans, while still ensuring that the party with a majority on the council retained control over the outcome.

Making the Howard County redistricting commission more independent (e.g., along the lines of the California commission) would require a change to the Howard County charter, and there doesn’t seem to be any real support at present for making such a change. In the meantime another possible approach is enabling more public participation in the redistricting process, either as part of the formal redistricting process or as part of a separate unofficial initiative.

As described in chapter 7 of Dividing Howard, when the district system was first adopted in Howard County the League of Women Voters encouraged members of the general public to try their own hand at coming up with a district plan, publishing a pamphlet containing the rules for redistricting and the precinct population data needed as input to the process. That effort apparently didn’t have any real impact; beyond the limited public interest in the fine details of redistricting, the process of creating districts is complicated enough that it would be unlikely that a typical citizen would be able to come up with a usable plan that satisfied the various legal criteria (compactness, contiguity, etc.) without some sort of assistance.

However recent years have seen growing interest in and work toward creating redistricting applications that can be used by non-experts; these are typically based on geographic information system (GIS) applications with additional software to implement redistricting algorithms of various levels of sophistication. For example, ESRI, the vendor of the most popular family of GIS applications, partnered with Los Angeles County to create the Public Access Plan site to allow residents to create and submit their own plans.

Other organizations and even individuals have produced open source software that allows anyone to run a redistricting application for their own use or for use by the general public. The most notable of such projects is the Public Mapping Project, which has created the open source District Builder software. I actually played around with District Builder a fair bit to see if I could get it working, but ran into enough issues that I had to give it up. For those with more money than time the GIS vendor Azavea (whose developers helped create District Builder) offers implementation services; Azavea also sponsors the informative Redistricting the Nation site.²

However ultimately the attempts to create “citizen maps” will come to naught unless they receive institutional backing from those who actually have some measure of official input into the process. In a local context, Howard County Republicans seem to have approached this round of redistricting pretty much as they did the last time, like a football team that always runs it up the middle. It would have been interesting to see the Howard County GOP change their game plan somewhat and go with an approach that explicitly incorporated public input and participation.

For example, why not put local Republican redistricting experts to work creating a Howard County equivalent of the Los Angeles public access site, have the League of Women Voters or some other nonpartisan group sponsor it, and commit in advance to present as the Republican plan whatever came out of that public process? In the absence of a council majority the end result would have likely been the same, but the Howard County GOP I think would have been in a better position to lobby against district changes it didn’t like and to gain public support for future changes to improve its position in the redistricting game.

Or maybe the better thing, not just for Howard County Republicans but for Howard County as a whole, would just be to abandon the council district system entirely, and go back to electing council members at large. I’ll have more to say on that in my next post.

In the meantime I encourage you to check out Dividing Howard if you haven’t already; it’s only $2.99 from Amazon or Barnes and Noble, and all royalties go to the local charity Voices for Children, which recruits and trains volunteer advocates to represent the best interests of abused and neglected children in Howard County courts.

1. See the Legislative Guide to Redistricting in Iowa for more information on the history and operation of the Iowa redistricting process.

2. For examples of individual efforts to create redistricting plans and software see the Redistricting Now and B-Districting blogs and the Dave’s Redistricting site. News articles on the phenomenon include “The rise of do-it-yourself redistricting” (Stateline), “There Comes a Time When People Just Have to Set Boundaries” (Wall Street Journal), and “Technology allows citizens to be part of redistricting process” (USA Today).