OPINION

Detroit Free Press Editorial Board | Detroit Free Press

Michigan's congressional elections are rigged.

We know this because one of the consultants Michigan Republicans enlisted to rig them after the 2010 census notified his clients that he'd completed his assignment.

“We’ve spent a lot of time providing options to ensure we have a solid 9-5 delegation in 2012 and beyond,” Bob LaBrant, a veteran GOP strategist and longtime executive for the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, reported in a May 2011 email extolling the new political map he and other Republicans had conjured in secrecy.

In a separate email that month, Jack Daly, chief of staff for then-U.S. Rep Thaddeus McCotter (R-Livonia), suggested a tweak "to cram ALL of the Dem garbage in Wayne, Washtenaw, Oakland and Macomb counties into only four districts" already represented by Democratic lawmakers.

Just weeks later, GOP legislators voted along party lines to adopt the reconfigured political boundaries LaBrant and his colleagues had crafted. The new map lived up to its advance billing: Republicans, who had won a majority of Michigan's congressional seats only three times in the previous 12 election cycles, won 9 of 14 seats the following year. They have retained that margin in every congressional election since — even when more Michigan voters cast ballots for Democratic congressional candidates than for their Republican rivals.

This is the distorted, unrepresentative face of gerrymandering in the 21st Century.

But on Nov. 6, Michigan voters have an extraordinary opportunity to wrest control of the redistricting process from the hands of self-serving politicians and place it in the hands of an independent citizens' commission beholden to no political party.

The vehicle at hand is Proposal 2, a proposed amendment to the state constitution. The initiative won a place on the November ballot after a grassroots group called Voters Not Politicians (VNP) collected signatures of support from more than 400,000 voters fed up with Michigan's political status quo.

Borrowing features from similar commissions established by several other states, Proposal 2 is complex, highly transparent and imperfect. If adopted, it's likely to precipitate legal challenges by Republican and Democratic officials anxious to reassert their parties' historical domination of the political redistricting process.

But the major parties have utterly failed to collaborate on a redistricting process that serves the interests of voters, especially independents who don't consistently gravitate to one party's candidates. VNP's ballot initiative offers voters a practical way to assure fairer representation and encourage more robust political competition in a state that needs both.

That's why the Free Press recommends a YES vote on Proposal 2.

Detroit Free Press

An increasingly potent weapon

Partisan gerrymandering has been a staple of American politics for the better part of two centuries. The idea is to pack the opposing party's loyal voters into as few districts as possible while strategically distributing one's own voters to guarantee the maximum number of "safe" seats.

In Michigan and most other states, the party that controls the state Legislature controls the political reorientation process all states are required to undertake after the decennial federal census. The majority party typically configures boundaries to maximize its changes in as many districts as possible.

But the manipulation of political maps has grown dramatically more sophisticated in the last decade or so. New algorithms that forecast voters' political preferences with ever-greater precision and computer modeling that allows strategists to compare likely electoral outcomes in thousands of different boundary configurations have combined to make gerrymandering a more potent weapon.

Michigan is among half a dozen swing states targeted in a 2010 initiative known as REDMAP, short for Redistricting Majority Project, in which Michigan's LaBrant and other Republican strategists focused their party's financial and advertising resources on a small number of state legislative districts where victories would assure GOP control of the redistricting process in 2011.

The political map that emerged after Republicans won control of the Michigan Legislature that year systematically diluted the Democratic vote not only in congressional races, but also in state House and Senate districts around the state. In the three elections since — 2012, 2014 and 2016 — the Republicans' share of legislative seats has exceeded its candidates' share of the vote by at least 7 percent.

Statisticians using a variety of methods to compare gerrymandering's impact on state electoral results agree that Michigan's political boundaries neutralize Democratic votes more effectively than almost any other state's.

LaBrant and his confederates downplay their role in the resulting distortion of voters' will. They blame their party's disproportionate representation in the state Legislature and the state congressional delegation on Democratic voters' tendency to cluster in cities and federal election laws that forbid the dilution of majority-black districts.

But the emails cited above, and other correspondence that has surfaced in a federal lawsuit filed by the League of Women Voters and Democratic voters, gives the lie to those deflections. The overwhelming evidence is that Michigan's current legislative map grew out of a purposeful conspiracy, not a demographic accident.

How Proposal 2 would help

The constitutional amendment proposed by Voters Not Politicians would curtail such partisan manipulations in two fundamental ways.

► First, it would transfer the authority to draw Michigan's legislative and congressional boundaries from whichever party controlled the state Legislature to a citizen's commission composed of 13 voters drawn from a randomly selected pool of 200 volunteers.

After elected leaders from the major parties had exercised their option to eliminate up to 10 volunteers each, the Secretary of State would blindly draw names from the remaining pool of 180 until a commission including four Republicans, four Democrats and five voters affiliated with neither major party was selected.

To win approval, any redistricting plan would have to command the votes of at least two Democratic commissioners, two Republicans and three independents.

► Second, besides limiting partisan membership in the commission, the proposed amendment would charge commissioners to draw legislative and congressional districts without reference to residents' political affiliations.

Districts would have to be geographically compact and contiguous, comprise approximately the same number of residents and comply with federal voting laws. But instead of parsing voters according to their political inclination, the commission would endeavor to recognize "communities of interest" that could include a wide array of factors, including a region's ethnic heritage, dominant livelihood, or proximity to bodies of water.

Republicans reluctant to relinquish their party's dominant role have argued that Proposal 2 is a thinly disguised scheme to assert Democratic control over redistricting. But it's hard to understand how limitations on the commission's membership and the explicit prohibition of partisan criteria would permit either party to dominate the process.

And Proposal 2's mandate that all the commission's deliberations and actions take place in public would surely discourage the chicanery revealed in the email correspondence among LaBrant and his colleagues.

VPN's ballot initiative will not guarantee perfect representation, nor bring a sudden end to the political polarization that plagues our state. But it seems likely to temper the distortions baked into Michigan's current political map and conjure a more competitive landscape in which candidates skilled at compromise and collaboration are rewarded for their pragmatism.