Let’s be clear about one thing: Proposition 4 prohibits gerrymandering—by anyone. It prohibits drawing district lines to favor any candidate or party.
Ernest Istook’s Guest Opinion entitled “Proposition 4’s poison pill will make gerrymandering even worse” completely misinterprets the law as it is written.
Mr. Istook mistakenly claims that Prop 4 “mandates gerrymandering” by imposing an “explicit guarantee that partisan interests MUST be given priority.” Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, Proposition 4 does the exact opposite.
Prop 4 prohibits gerrymandering by imposing mandatory standards for drawing voting districts. Those standards include keeping cities, towns, and traditional neighborhoods together, making compact districts, and—most importantly—NOT drawing districts in a manner that unduly favors any candidate or party.
Mr. Istook misconstrues how Prop 4 will work. First, the term partisan symmetry does not mean, as he supposes, “proportional representation.” Partisan symmetry is the principle “that a district plan should treat the major parties symmetrically with respect to the conversion of votes to seats.” (Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos & Eric M. McGhee, Partisan Gerrymandering and the Efficiency Gap, 82 U. Chi. L. Rev. 831, 833 [2015]). It is a measure that reveals whether a map is gerrymandered. The term “partisan symmetry” is far from controversial, and the idea that a vote cast by a member of one party should count the same as a vote cast by a member of another party is neither novel nor unfair.
So measuring a map according to partisan symmetry does not mandate allocating Congressional seats according to any formula—it mandates merely that your vote counts the same as mine.
The other place that Mr. Istook gets things wrong is in the law’s application of the term “partisan symmetry.” The only place in the law that the term appears is in a section that addresses how maps will be assessed after they are drawn. The term is not used in the section of the law that addresses how the maps should be drawn.
Here’s how the process will work: The Commission and the Legislature (if it chooses to do so) will draw maps that must adhere to the standards set forth in the law, including the prohibition against using partisan data to favor one candidate or party over another. After the maps have been drawn (and they can’t be drawn using partisan data), the Commission or the Legislature will assess whether their maps violate the prohibition on gerrymandering.
That’s where the term “partisan symmetry” kicks in. The law states that they “shall use judicial standards and the best available data and scientific and statistical methods, including measures of partisan symmetry to assess whether a proposed redistricting plan abides by [the standards].”Thus Prop 4 utilizes the term as one among many “scientific and statistical methods” to assess whether a particular map conforms to the standards.
We would be willing to overlook Mr. Istook’s confusion over these basic ideas were it not for his wrongfully placed—and insidious—insistence that Prop 4 is being sold under “false pretenses.” There is nothing false about the intentions of the backers of Proposition 4 and the nearly 200,000 Utahns who signed the petition to get it on the ballot. Proposition 4 is about ending gerrymandering in Utah by everyone. Plain and simple.
Please read the law more carefully than Mr. Istook did. You will then see that a “Yes” on 4 is an obvious “No” to gerrymandering.
Blake Moore is the Republican Co-Chair of Prop. 4/Better Boundaries
