The $250 million dollar special election on Nov. 4 will ask voters to weigh in on a  single issue: Yes or No on Proposition 50. A “yes” vote overturns the Independent Redistricting Commission, also known as the Fair Voter Act, and allows politicians to redraw the Congressional districts. A “no” vote keeps the current maps and the existing system in place.

The claim made in favor of Prop 50 is that “Donald Trump and Texas Republicans are making an unprecedented power grab” by redrawing districts in Texas that will create five new Republican Congressional seats. Supporters argue that, in response, California needs to allow Governor Newsom and state Democrats to override the Independent Redistricting Commission and create five new Democratic seats.

This argument is flawed and distracts from the ways Prop 50 will harm California voters.

What Texas is doing is correcting several districts that were drawn along racial lines incompatible with the Voting Rights Act. Texas also follows a “winner-takes-the-spoils” approach where the majority party can redraw maps at will. In contrast, California voted to adopt a citizen-led redistricting system that includes voters from across the political spectrum. As a result, California has some of the most competitive congressional races in the country. The more competitive a race is, the more the politicians are forced to be responsive to their constituents. Prop 50 redesigns the maps to ensure pre-determined political outcomes. This kind of gerrymandering is best described as politicians choosing their voters rather than voters choosing their politicians, and will result in the loss of some California’s few remaining centrist representatives.

The only way to create these five new Democrat seats is to carve more conservative counties into pieces and dilute their representation. One of the [worst] examples of this is the way agricultural communities will be split and mixed in with urban and tech counties. Community representation will be sacrificed to partisan political gain.   

A Yes on Prop 50 vote is framed as a means to fight Trump. What is misunderstood is that states need to work with both Democrat and Republican administrations. California, for example, relies heavily on federal money. By ending almost all non-Democrat representation, Prop 50 greatly weakens the state’s ability to work across party lines to get what its residents need. There is no guarantee this arrangement would be temporary. Once politicians are allowed to lock in power with a stroke of a pen, rather than be forced to work to win their voters, they are highly unlikely to give up this power.

There is also the danger that Prop 50 would be extended to state senate and assembly races as well, locking in more power for incumbent politicians. Policies from the state’s current leadership have resulting in California having the highest rates of poverty, unemployment, homelessness, gas prices, income tax and illiteracy. Prop 50 would allow the very leaders responsible for these problems to draw their own districts, continuing these trends – on steroids. 

Prop 50 is not an “Election Rigging Response Act;” it is election rigging – and it should be decisively rejected by voters far too savvy to fall for it.

Lisa Cusack
Glendale