Joe Schwarz champions push to end gerrymandering

In a meeting room at St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Joe Schwarz was sounding almost like a preacher.

Michigan is "one of the most gerrymandered states in the union," the former congressman said as he gestured to maps behind him.

"Battle Creek," he added, "is an utterly perfect example,"

For decades, Battle Creek shared a district with Kalamazoo in what was once the Third District. That link was broken in redistricting in 1992, and the city found itself just on the other side of a new dividing line, placing it in the Seventh District district with Jackson.

That version of the Seventh District began as staunchly Republican. It was represented by Nick Smith until 2005, by the more moderate Schwartz until 2007 and by the more conservative Tim Wahlberg until 2009. Then it went to Democrat Mark Schauer.

Though Schauer was defeated by Wahlberg in 2010, the Republicans responsible for the latest round of redistricting moved Calhoun County into a redesigned and solidly Republican Third District that includes Battle Creek and Grand Rapids.

"If you wanted a Congressional district in this part of the state that made more sense than anything else, you’d have Kalamazoo and Battle Creek together in a Congressional district as they were for 90 years in the 20th Century, until things started to change," Schwarz said.

Schwartz and a group called Voters Not Politicians are working for change in a different direction, pushing a 2018 ballot initiative to revamp the way redistricting is done.

The present system allows the political party in power when congressional district lines are redrawn to do so to their own advantage, pushing their opponents into as few districts as possible, splitting up those that remain to minimize their effect on electoral outcomes.

The practice goes back more than two centuries. In 1812, Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry approved a bill rearranging districts to help the Democratic-Republican Party. Critics at the time said a resulting district had the twisty shape of a salamander: gerrymander.

But it has become more prevalent and more precisely executed in recent decades.

“Right now, the people in our state don’t have access to having their voices heard because politicians are essentially guaranteeing the outcomes of our elections before anyone even casts a ballot,” Voters Not Politicians President and Treasurer Katie Fahey said.

Voters Not Politicians has been holding meetings in the area to inform people of their ballot initiative.

Now, district lines for the state's U.S. Congressional districts and Michigan's two legislative bodies are redrawn by the state legislature every decade after the census count. The governor can veto the new district lines.

Under the proposed amendment, a commission of four Democrats, four Republicans and five non-partisan members would draw the lines while being prohibited from doing it in a way to favor parties.

The Secretary of State would randomly pick the members of the commission.

The group needed 315,654 signatures from Michigan voters to get the initiative on the November 2018 ballot. They posted on Facebook that they had over 400,000 signatures on Nov. 28.

Fahey said there were signatures from every county in Michigan.

“People are extremely excited about this because they’re sick of the lack of transparency in our current government,” Fahey said.

The number of people who vote in Michigan is roughly evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, Schwarz said.

“So if that’s the case, why in our 14 seats in Congress is it nine to five Republican?" he said. "Why is the state senate 27 to 11 Republican? Why is the state house 63 to 47 Republican? The answer to that is: very well thought out, well planned, mathematically brilliant gerrymandering in the case of the 2011 reapportionment by the Republican party.”

Some conservatives publicly questioned whether Voters Not Politicians is the non-partisan effort it claims to be, pointing to the fact that several of the organization's board members have donated to Democratic candidates in the past, but not to Republicans.

But Schwarz emphasized that what benefits one party today could help another down the line.

“I give (Republicans) credit for doing an absolutely superb job of reapportioning to favor the Republican party," he said, "understanding that, had the Democrats been the people reapportioning, they would have done the same thing."

There are limits to what a new redistricting process will change, said University of Michigan Ford School of Public Policy Professer Emeritus John Chamberlin. Because Democrats tend to be clustered in cities anyway, it's unlikely maps could be drawn that perfectly represent districts.

"But it's hard to imagine that an independent redistricting commission wouldn't have yielded results closer to a 50-50 split," Chamberlin said.

Chamberlin said there are thousands of ways a non-gerrymandered Michigan could look, but the simplest way to envision it is to look at a pre-1992 map of districts.

Where puzzle-piece-shaped districts now are common, the map used to be plain by comparison.

"If you look then to the one in the early 2000s, you can see particularly in Detroit they’re starting to finagle stuff around some, but not terribly," Chamberlin said. "And yet the 2003 map is a gerrymander. They just killed the Democratic delegation there, but it doesn’t look horrible."

It got worse with the current map, Chamberlin said.

The person now representing Battle Creek interests in Washington, D.C., is Republican Justin Amash. At a town hall event at the Kool Family Community Center in September, Voters Not Politicians activists wanted to know his thoughts on gerrymandering.

Amash said he's strongly against gerrymandering that favors one party over another.

"I think that it's totally outrageous," Amash said, adding that it makes more sense for Battle Creek to be grouped with Kalamazoo than with Grand Rapids.

Not everyone agrees that the commission is a good idea. Republican strategist and redistricting expert Bob LaBrant told the Associated Press in November that there were problems with how the commission would work and that standards were too vague.

LaBrant also said districts wouldn't be compact.

"You're going to have these districts spoking out of urban cities into township and rural areas to basically kind of spread out the Democratic urban vote," LaBrant said.

There are also strong forces opposed to the proposal, Fahey acknowledged.

"You have lobbyists," Fahey said. "You have a lot of big interests that can save a lot of money from not needing to worry about who’s going to be elected next by already knowing."

Chamberlin said an independent commission is likely the best idea right now. He said the success of petitioners getting people to sign up is a sign that the public has an idea of what's been happening on the maps.

"I think people generally have an understanding that something’s not on the up and up," he said.

Contact Andy Fitzpatrick at 269-966-0697 or afitzpatrick@battlecreekenquirer.com. Follow him on Twitter: @am_fitzpatrick.