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Conference addresses electoral redistricting
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“Redistricting is about the legitimacy of elections and the legitimacy of the governing body. The fact that the process often takes place behind closed doors raises questions about the legitimacy of the body that is elected.”
A major—and timely—conference at UB Law School on Oct. 14 and 15 will address a contentious aspect of the democratic process: redistricting, the periodic redrawing of election-district boundaries in accordance with the constitutional mandate of “one person, one vote.”
The conference, “Major Developments in Redistricting,” will bring together practitioners, public-interest lawyers, democracy advocacy groups and academics to discuss what conference organizer Michael Halberstam, associate professor of law, calls “a fundamental part of our democratic process.”
Sponsored by the Law School’s Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy, it will be held in 509 O’Brian Hall, North Campus.
“Redistricting is about the legitimacy of elections and the legitimacy of the governing body,” says Halberstam, who is organizing the conference with James A. Gardner, SUNY Distinguished Professor and vice dean, and Rick Su, associate professor. “The fact that the process often takes place behind closed doors raises questions about the legitimacy of the body that is elected. At a time when people are so disaffected by politics and so disaffected by government, it’s no time to further delegitimize the process.”
Congressional redistricting gets the most media attention because it potentially can change the balance of power in the House of Representatives. But this conference concentrates on local redistricting, particularly in New York State’s counties, cities and other local jurisdictions.
“There’s no standard for this,” Halberstam says. “The timing is different in every locality, the procedures are different. There’s no one really paying attention to this in any focused way.”
He explains that past controversies about the dilution of the minority vote in redistricting have given way to broader concerns about a lack of transparency in the process. Alert voters, he says, are fed up with legislators arranging their own job security by drawing politically “safe” districts for themselves.
“It’s unrealistic to think that the political market is going to regulate itself, any more than commercial markets can regulate themselves,” he says. “The problem is that information isn’t evenly distributed and readily available. What we currently have is the worst of all possible worlds—to have legislators choose their own seats.”
In addition to the three UB Law organizers, presenters at the conference will include faculty members from the Duke, Harvard, University of Michigan and University of Texas law schools and George Mason and Fordham universities; representatives of the Pew Trust, the Brennan Center and the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project; and attorneys working in New York, Washington, D.C., and Texas.
For his part, Halberstam will present his proposal to establish a redistricting clearinghouse that would gather, store and publicize information for all local redistrictings in New York State in an Internet-accessible database. “A lot of people involved in the process aren’t aware of the rules,” Halberstam says. “The goal is to provide for each local redistricting the particular laws that apply there.
“My hope is to create a mechanism of monitoring by disclosure. You let the local institutions do what they want to do, but you force them to provide information to a central organization.”
Such a clearinghouse, he says, could identify a set of best-practices standards for local redistricting, then call out localities that fail to implement those practices—a watchdog function pushing lawmakers toward making the redistricting process fairer and more open to public scrutiny.
In addition, the conference will feature a demonstration workshop of publicly available software that enables democracy advocates to challenge redistricting decisions based on demographic data. The workshop will be co-sponsored by the Buffalo Partnership for the Public Good. Like all conference events, it is open to the public.
Those wishing to attend the conference should register at BaldyRSVP@buffalo.edu. For more details and the full lineup of presenters, visit the conference website.
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