Home of Today's Common Sense

Published Brownsville Herald 1/25/2004
I read the Herald’s most recent article on re-districting published January 11. I agree that the effort and resources used to accomplish the gerrymandering was misspent and would have been better spent on other things like education, I do not agree that it will cause political mayhem as was pronounced. I cannot accept that anarchy or chaos will result.
Further, the action is not unprecedented. While not common, it is not unheard of. There have been several past articles published here describing instances of the lines being changed for one reason or another, between census reports.
A big difference here is that the Republicans came out and said to everyone that they were improving their political position. At the very least they were straight forward about that. Past gerrymandering was promoted by Democrats “to improve the representation of minorities” which could only be done by them.
I contend that all gerrymandering is done to improve the position of the party in power.
As a one time employee of the brilliant pollster Dan Rivera, I became interested in the demographics of the Valley and continued that interest to my later benefit as a business consultant. The Congressional Districts are determined based on a census of “all persons” in the United States. Courts have decided that this does not mean just citizens who can vote but everyone; permanent residents and undocumented residents as well. As the demographic makeup of the Rio Grande Valley is a predominately ethnic (Hispanic), with close family ties outside the U.S., there are higher percentages of non-citizens than there are in some other regions of the state. That translates into fewer folks that can vote having a greater influence on the outcome of an election than in other districts.
The situation is further aggravated by the fact that a very low percent of the eligible voters in the Valley vote at all. So those that do vote in the whole Congressional District have an enormous impact on the outcome of an election. If you assume that 37% (modest) of the population are non-citizen residents that means that only 63% of the Valley residents are picking who will make our laws for us. Then if only 15% of those actually vote, as was the case in recent elections, then only 9 out of every 100 people in the Valley are picking who will make the laws and programs that could benefit us. I guarantee that the legislators who were setting the district lines were well aware of this and placed, areas where there are histories of higher voter turn out into districts including Valley areas. Lastly, the cold fact of life is that political leaders are most interested in the interests of people who vote and participate.
In order to change the planned outcome and achieve some respect for the needs of the Valley, more folks need to vote; otherwise we can count on less and less.