News Clips

Advocates for redistricting reform already have their sights set on a better process, possibly an independent commission such as ones used in other states. Catherine Turcer, executive director of Common Cause Ohio, said they would not rush anything to the ballot, but something needed to change.  "They're drunk on power," Turcer said. "They need to be removed from the decision-making process." 

Getting people to look beyond congressional gerrymandering and at distortions for state legislative districts can be a challenge, said Suzanne Almedia, redistricting and representation counsel at Common Cause, a government watchdog group. “Particularly, given the polarized nature of the US Congress, it’s a lot more straightforward to tell a story of Democrats versus Republicans on the national level than it is to think through the nuances of what happens on the state level,” she said. The policies that most directly affect people’s lives, she added – school funding, public health policy and voting rights among them – are all decided by state legislatures. One recent survey found that Republicans are more likely to identify state legislatures as an important forum for driving policy decisions.

Heather Ferguson, a co-signor of the letter and executive director of Common Cause New Mexico, said that Ivey-Soto referred to her and a female colleague by the nickname “Lips and Hips” in 2016. “We walked into a meeting with him,” Ferguson said. “He said, ‘Here comes Lips and Hips.’” Ferguson said she told Ivey-Soto the nickname was sexist and degrading, and that he repeated it later.  She described a “toxic culture” at the Legislature, praised Anaya’s courage for filing a formal complaint and said greater whistleblower protections are needed.

“The winner is chosen in the primary and the primary draws, for lack of a better way of saying it, the most extreme and emotional voters,” said Bob Phillips, who leads the redistricting reform group Common Cause NC. He said he’s heard state legislators on both sides of the aisle complain that their party’s leaders instruct them not to even mingle with the other side when they’re in Raleigh, let alone vote with them. “We’ve seen it in Raleigh and seen it in Washington,” he said. “Folks that come have no incentive to compromise because they’ll only be punished for it.” Phillips said House Bill 2, the controversial 2016 law that became known nationally as the “bathroom bill” and ended up costing North Carolina millions of dollars, is an example of politicians supporting polarizing bills. It’s OK for them to pass laws that please their base even if it goes against popular opinion, he said, because gerrymandering insulates them from any fallout. The state legislative districts in use at the time were later ruled unconstitutional gerrymanders, and Phillips said that looking at those maps, 92% of those who voted for HB2 in the N.C. House either didn’t have an opponent in their previous election or won it by double digits. Phillips said he blames gerrymandering in part for this, since it tends to make politicians beholden more to their party’s furthest wings, but he also blames also other factors, including media coverage focused on the most extreme views from either side. “It may also embolden you to speak in a more shrill, harsh, attacking mode,” he said. “We’ve certainly seen that decline in civility.”

“What’s really sad about all of this for Ohio voters: not that many people vote in primaries anyway," said Mia Lewis, associate director of the good-government group Common Cause Ohio. "What’s going to be the incentive for an Ohio voter to bother to pay attention and figure all of this out?”

Longtime Tennessee public interest lobbyist Dick Williams, who heads Common Cause Tennessee, said the alleged Phoenix Solutions scheme is a “more extreme” example that likely doesn’t indicate a larger problem with the system, which can always use fine-tuning. “It’s an example that in any group of people, including legislators, you’re going to have a few people that are wanting to game the system, one way or another, and be deceitful of, supposedly, their friends even,” Williams said.