Every 10 years, states redraw their legislative and congressional district lines using data from the latest national census.
The problem is that one political party often manipulates the maps to give itself an advantage — a process called gerrymandering — so that instead of voters choosing their representatives, politicians choose their voters — attempting to guarantee their own party’s politicians success in future elections.
For the first time in history, on December 28, 2021, randomly selected Michigan voters — not politicians — adopted the new maps for Congress, State Senate, and State House.
Michigan’s new Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission (MICRC) used a two-step process to chose its commission members.
Thirteen commissioners were randomly selected from among nine thousand volunteers: four affiliated with the Democratic Party, four from the Republican party and five unaffiliated voters.
No member can be a partisan officeholder, an employee of such an officeholder, or a lobbyist.
Each map has to be approved by a majority of at least two Democrats, two Republicans and two non-affiliated commissioners.
However, creating the redistricting commission was a major challenge because first Michigan had to amend its state constitution.
After the 2016 election season, Katie Fahey was concerned about growing political polarization but felt that gerrymandering was an issue that most people could agree on, regardless of political party.
She founded a citizens group called Voters Not Politicians (VNP) which held 33 town hall meetings in March and April of 2017 to ask people how they thought a fair redistricting commission should work.
VNP volunteers studied other other states and sought advice from election law experts to write a proposal for a ballot initiative to change Michigan’s redistricting process.
The VNP collected more than 425,000 petition signatures across every county in Michigan to put Proposal 2 on the ballot and raised millions of dollars to promote it and to fight subsequent legal challenges that tried to keep it off the ballot.
The Michigan Court of Appeals ruled in favor of VNP in June 2018, and in July, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled 4-3 in VNP’s favor.
It appeared on the ballot on November 6, 2018 and more than 2.5 million Michigan voters decided by a majority of 61% from across the political spectrum to implement a fair, impartial, and transparent redistricting process.
The MICRC highlights the potential of randomly selected citizens handling important decisions rather than elected politicians.
You can watch (for free with commercials) Slay the Dragon, the documentary film which tells the amazing story of Voters Not Politicians’ success. (https://tubitv.com/movies/725435/slay-the-dragon)
Perhaps we can put randomly selected voters in charge of redistricting in the other 49 states.
