CleanSweep candidate Harris Martin (D -- House 18th) on the Roadmap to Redistricting Reform

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 6/29/2006
Bensalem, PA
Contact 215-208-5264
electmartin@yahoo.com

A ten-point Roadmap to Reform was recently proposed by the nine-group Reform Coalition made up of Common Cause PA, the Commonwealth Foundation, Democracy Rising PA, the League of Women Voters of PA, PA Citizens for Legislator Accountability, PA Council of Churches, Rock The Capitol, Stop The Illegal Pay Raise Inc., and the Young Conservatives of PA. The 10 reforms are lobbyist control, “over by October” (no more lame duck legislative sessions), stronger open records laws, online posting of legislators’ voting records, citizen opportunity period (72+ hour time before final bills can be voted on), limitation and on-line posting of legislators’ perks, campaign finance reform, reapportionment reform, easier ballot access for independent and third party candidates, and the convening of a general state constitutional convention.

For very good reason, several Bucks County PACleanSweep candidates including Chris Serpico (D 10th Senate District) and John Galloway (D 140th House District) have been quoted in this paper advocating real lobbyist control/lobbying reform measures. The Bucks County Courier Times, the Allentown Morning Call and other newspapers around the state, State Representative Greg Vitali of Delaware County, Barry Kaufman of Common Cause PA, and others have pointed out how woefully inadequate that House Speaker John Perzel’s recently past lobbyist control bill is. The need for lobbying reform is so obvious to so many people that it will probably get more attention in the press than the other nine reforms in the Roadmap to Reform or other measures advocated by reformers.

I would like to address the important issue of redistricting reform because gerrymandering of legislative districts is a large part of the root cause of what is wrong in Harrisburg and Washington. Once every 10 years following the US Census, all state and federal legislative districts in the country are subject to being redrawn (redistricted or reapportioned), usually by the state legislatures, to equalize district populations in response to uneven population growth from place to place. This process is frequently abused for partisan advantage, resulting in gerrymandered districts drawn to promote the reelection of as many incumbents of the majority party as possible. Reapportionment reform or redistricting reform as proposed in the Roadmap to Reform includes a requirement for legislative districts to be as politically competitive as possible.

Under the current redistricting system in Pennsylvania, the party in control of the state legislature skews the legislative boundary maps to favor their party and make elections as uncompetitive as possible. To do this, they have to make some districts overwhelmingly safe for incumbents of the minority party in order to maximize the majority party’s advantage in the most districts possible. In Pennsylvania, the results of this gerrymandering now favor the Republicans but in some past decades, they have favored the Democrats. Whoever does it, gerrymandering is wrong and we need to put a stop to it.

We now have many districts that make no sense when viewed on the map. These district maps can be viewed on the website of the Philadelphia Inquirer at www.phillynews.com. Bucks County’s 8th Congressional District has the bizarrely shaped “Greenwood gash” plunging deep into Montgomery County’s 13th Congressional District, including small slices of three different townships rather than just one entire single township. In this and several other ways, the congressional map of Montgomery County has been sliced and diced to protect incumbent Republican seats and hinder growing Democratic electoral success in that county. A large part of the 7th Congressional District which includes most of Delaware County and part of eastern Chester County juts ridiculously into the Montgomery County eastern part of the 6th Congressional District, cutting off nearly the entire eastern part of the 6th district from the rest of the 6th district. This makes no sense geographically and should not be perpetuated in the 2011 redistricting.

In similar fashion, in northern Delaware County, Radnor, Marple, Newtown, and Upper Providence townships have been sliced and diced to form the 161st and 165th state House districts which look like mutant snakes that got run over by a truck. The voters of these townships do not benefit from this. One of the most egregious examples of gerrymandering in the Philadelphia region is House Republican Speaker John Perzel’s 172nd House District which consists of four entirely separate and unconnected pieces of territory, apparently chosen because they are the most heavily Republican districts in Northeast Philadelphia. The four separate pieces are supposedly connected to one another by thin slivers one row house wide but you can’t tell that from looking at the map. Perzel’s district looks like four jigsaw puzzle pieces that got dropped on the floor, with nothing but threads of carpet lint connecting them. This is outrageous. The map of state House and Senate districts in the City of Philadelphia looks like whoever drew the boundaries was drunk or high on drugs. In fact, the people who drew these strange district shapes were not drunk or high. They were using sophisticated computer database and mapping software to create district shapes that would most effectively insure the perpetual reelection of entrenched incumbents and/or allow party machine favored politicians to live outside the main areas of the districts they run to represent.

Right here in lower Bucks, the Republicans who control the state legislature reshaped the 6th State Senate District to promote the continued reelection of Republican State Senator Tommy Tomlinson. Heavily Democratic Falls Township and Tullytown and Morrisville Boroughs were removed from the 6th Senate District and replaced with heavily Republican Northampton, Warwick, and Wrightstown Townships and Ivyland Borough. Falls Township and Tullytown and Morrisville Boroughs were put into the heavily Republican 12th State Senate District, denying these voters the opportunity to have a State Senator of their own party represent them.

Senate districts. Townships such as Bensalem, Falls, Newtown, Northampton, Lower Makefield, Wrightstown, Warrington, Doylestown, and Solebury are fortunate to be entirely within one House district. Other townships such as Lower Southampton, Middletown, Upper Southampton, Warminster, Warwick, and Upper Makefield are split between House districts, fracturing their representation and giving them less influence in Harrisburg, regardless of which political party controls their local governments. Boroughs are generally small enough that they are rarely split between House districts. To achieve districts of equal population, some splitting of municipalities is unavoidable but this splitting of municipalities should be kept to a minimum. We may need to create districts that are not exactly equal in population in order to minimize the splitting of municipalities between districts.

In the 2001 round of partisan gerrymandering, congressional district maps statewide were carefully redrawn in such a way as to insure a Republican majority for the state’s congressional delegation, in spite of the fact that there are 500,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans in Pennsylvania. This was wrong and the Democrats sued in court to change it for good reason. It is shameful that our state and federal appeals courts ruled in favor of gerrymandering and upheld the Republican drawn district boundaries. In the recently infamous partisan Republican gerrymandering of Texas that was engineered in part by the now disgraced Congressman Tom Delay, Democratic state legislators were so upset with being cut out of the redistricting process that they fled en-masse to Oklahoma with state troopers on their tails. This is insane. It needs to stop.

While it is now the Republicans doing the gerrymandering, it must be pointed out that in the past Democratic Party controlled state legislatures committed equally unfair acts of gerrymandering. Thus both parties have been guilty of this abuse of our system of representative democracy. However, modern gerrymandering methods are now more insidious and precise with the use of computer geographic information systems (GIS) and other computer voter and demographic database software and mapping software

Now that we understand the problem, let’s get to the solution. For legislative districts to be as politically competitive as possible and have reasonable and logical boundaries, state law should be changed to include the following requirements. The State Constitution will require amending to achieve some of these goals.

1. Legislative districts should be entirely contiguous and as geographically compact as possible. No more squashed snakes and no more scrambled jigsaw puzzle pieces connected by thin hairs.
2. Legislative district boundaries should follow municipal boundaries as much as possible. District boundaries should be drawn so that as many municipalities and counties as possible are contained entirely within one district. No more slicing and dicing of counties and townships unless absolutely unavoidable.
3. Municipalities should be grouped into districts in such a way as to make the two political parties as competitive with one another as possible as long as this goal does not run counter to goals 1 and 2.
4. Slight deviations from the goal of exact equality in population size from district to district should be allowed in order to achieve goals 1, 2, and 3.
5. Control of redistricting should be taken away from partisan legislatures controlled by one political party and put in the hands of a non partisan commission or a bipartisan commission that is chaired by a registered independent with a tie-breaking vote. This independent Commission Chair should be an expert in geography and/or demographics. This is how New Jersey does it and it works very well there.

Another recommendation comes from a June 23, 2006 editorial in the Pocono Record newspaper. The editorial complains of how Monroe County has been sliced and diced with regard to State Senate districts, denying voters in that large and rapidly growing county meaningful representation in the State Senate. The editorial recommends not only having a State Senate district entirely within that county, but also matching State House district boundaries with State Senate district boundaries like New Jersey does. The editorial says that “Separate, independent legislative districts for the state senate and state house is a formula for confusion” and recommends the new Jersey model New Jersey has exactly two House districts for every Senate district, with each Senate district divided into two House districts. Thus each New Jersey State Senate district has a team of one senator and two representatives working together (sometimes across party lines) to look out for the interests of that district.

In Pennsylvania, we have 50 State Senate districts and 203 State House districts, almost exactly a 1 to 4 ratio. If we reduce the size of the state legislature by just three State House districts, we could draw State House boundaries to fit exactly four State House districts into each State Senate district. This would create a team of five legislators working to represent the interests of that area. Some reformers think that we should substantially reduce the size of Pennsylvania’s legislature. If we decide to do that, we should have an exact one to four, one to three, or one to two ratio of State Senators to State House Representatives and fit all State House districts entirely within particular Stated Senate districts.

According to the Pocono Record editorial, “The situation in Monroe County is unacceptable. The results of lack of representation are hurting people, and the next redistricting needs to do more than create safe districts for chronic politicians. The next redistricting needs to make Pennsylvania state government more responsive and more accountable to constituents.”

Clean and open government reform is not and should not be a partisan issue. Across the state, PACleanSweep candidates for State House and Senate include Republicans, Democrats, independents, and third party candidates who are all committed to reforms such as these. While this is not the case in other parts of the state, in Bucks County, all four of the PACleanSweep candidates who made it through the primary election victorious are Democrats. These Bucks PACleanSweep Democratic candidates are Chris Serpico (10th Senate District), Larry Glick (143rd House District), John Galloway (140th House District), and myself, Harris Martin (18th House District).

Four highly qualified pro-reform PACleanSweep Republicans ran in the primary election in Bucks County (Joe Schiaffino – 10th Senate District, Cathy Mendla – 12th Senate District, Ed Reeves – 142nd House District, and Bill O’Neil – 178th House District) but unfortunately, unlike in other parts of the state, none were successful. I very much regret that I and the other PACleanSweep Democrats from Bucks and elsewhere and the PACleanSweep Republicans from other counties will not have the opportunity to work with these four fine Bucks County PACleanSweep Republicans in the legislature to implement the reform agenda. We will form a bipartisan Reform Caucus in the House and Senate to implement these reforms but unfortunately, there will be no Republicans from Bucks County in that caucus.

As a candidate who is familiar with the other candidates in Bucks, I can say that the Democratic state House and Senate candidates in Bucks, including those not officially supported by PACleanSweep, are far more supportive of these reforms than are the Republican candidates in this November general election. This may not be the case in some other counties but it is in Bucks County. Thus if voters in Bucks County want to see clean and open government reforms enacted by our legislature, including redistricting reform, real lobbying reform, the rest of the ten-point Roadmap to Reform, and other reforms, they will need to vote Democratic, regardless of their personal political party affiliation.

The 8th Congressional District includes all of Bucks County, portions of Upper Moreland, Abington, and Upper Dublin Townships in Montgomery County (the “Greenwood gash”), and the eastern halves of the 58th and 66th wards in northeast Philadelphia. The 10th State Senate District includes Falls, Lower Makefield, Upper Makefield, Newtown, Solebury, Buckingham, and Doylestown Townships along with several townships in upper Bucks as well as Tullytown, Morrisville, Newtown, Yardley, New Hope, and Doylestown Boroughs, along with several boroughs in upper Bucks. The 143rd State House District includes Doylestown Township, Doylestown Borough, the northeastern part of Buckingham Township, along with several townships and boroughs in upper Bucks. The 140th State House District includes Falls Township, Bristol, Tullytown, and Morrisville Boroughs, two riverfront precincts in Bristol Township, and one precinct in the Levittown section of Middletown Township. The 18th State House District includes all of Bensalem Township and two precincts in the southwestern portion of Lower Southampton Township (W3 and W7).