Gerry Mander in Alaska

It has been an insanely busy month, and more excitement is coming down the pike.

The big news is from ol' Gerry Mander hisself, from a recent triumphant presentation in Alaska of How to Screw the Voters. Here's what will happen to the districts in which Goldstream and Ester lie, according to the News-Miner:

One notable shift at home: Ester, Fox and much of the Goldstream Valley would join a giant rural House district that includes scores of communities from across the state. It would straddle the Fairbanks area and stretch completely across Alaska — from the southwestern village of Holy Cross north to Arctic Village and southeast again to Chitina.:

Does this make sense at ALL? There was some of this before, too, almost as ridiculous: Coghill's district stretches from North Pole to Valdez.



Here's what Wikipedia says about gerrymandering:

In the process of setting electoral districts, rather than using uniform geographic standards, Gerrymandering is a practice of political corruption that attempts to establish a political advantage for a particular party or group by manipulating geographic boundaries to create partisan, incumbent-protected, and neutral districts. The resulting district is known as a gerrymander.…

The two aims of gerrymandering are to maximize the effect of supporters' votes and to minimize the effect of opponents' votes. One strategy, packing, is to concentrate as many voters of one type into a single electoral district to reduce their influence in other districts. In some cases this may be done to obtain representation for a community of common interest, rather than to dilute that interest over several districts to a point of ineffectiveness. A second strategy, cracking, involves spreading out voters of a particular type among many districts in order to deny them a sufficiently large voting bloc in any particular district. The strategies are typically combined, creating a few "forfeit" seats for packed voters of one type in order to secure even greater representation for voters of another type.

Gerrymandering is effective because of the wasted vote effect. By packing opposition voters into districts they will already win (increasing excess votes for winners) and by cracking the remainder among districts where they are moved into the minority (increasing votes for eventual losers), the number of wasted votes among the opposition can be maximized. Similarly, with supporters holding narrow margins in the unpacked districts, the number of wasted votes among supporters is minimized.

While the wasted vote effect is strongest when a party wins by narrow margins across multiple districts, gerrymandering narrow margins can be risky when voters are less predictable. To minimize the risk of demographic or political shifts swinging a district to the opposition, politicians can instead create more packed districts, leading to more comfortable margins in unpacked ones.

There is a public hearing in Fairbanks April 19, Tuesday, 2 to 6 pm at the Fairbanks City Hall, City Council Chamber on the 2nd floor: If you would like to comment on the utter monstrosity of a jerrymandered redistricting, please come to this hearing! If you are in another city, other hearings are taking place also and you can find out more from the Alaska Redistricting Board's website. PLEASE NOTE that I have also heard that these hearings will end at 4 pm, not 6, so I don't know if they've been curtailed, expanded, or if this is just a rumor. Getting there early if you can will be important. I will be taking time off work to get there.

Interesting how they timed it for most people's working hours, hmm?

At any rate, you might consider whether it is equitable or reasonable for Ester's Senate district to include--and no, I am NOT kidding--Sitka, or for us to be in the same district as, say, Arctic Village. This won't help the Bush and it sure won't help Ester or Fairbanks or Goldstream (or Sitka or Holy Cross) to be properly represented. This is sheer stupidity. There are two official options, both of which are clearly attempts to split voting blocks, with no regard for whether the residents of these areas have any commonalities of need or location. This won't serve anybody well. There are a few privately-suggested plans, also shown on the Board's website. There are several organizations proposing options.

Voting rights in Alaska

Most of the rest of the Alaska blogosphere seems to be talking about Wayne "Agenda" Ross, and I don't blame them (the guy's freaking scary), but there's yet another little item that needs Alaska bloggers' attention: Senate Bill 68, An Act Relating to the Voting Rights of Felons. This bill would liberalize the voting rights of people convicted of felonies in Alaska; right now, Alaska prevents felons from voting until they have served time, and are done with probation and/or parole. The bill would restrict voting rights only while a felon was actually incarcerated.

Two states, Maine and Vermont, allow prisoners the vote. Every other state and the District of Columbia all restrict felons' voting rights to some degree, and two states, Kentucky and Virginia, deny voting rights for life to anybody with a felony conviction and never mind whether they've paid their debt to society--they still have to pay, and can never have a vote again. This is draconian. Alaska is on the more restrictive end of the spectrum, although not in with the most restrictive states. Overall, the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world (although perhaps China may be higher--it's hard to tell).

SB 68 is a bill that should be passed. The Sentencing Project has some interesting statistics on incarceration and felony disenfranchisement (although, curiously, it doesn't provide statistics for Alaska Natives). There's a somewhat old site specifically on Alaska's prisoners that claims (as of November 2006) that "Alaska has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country." SitNews reported this February that

the number of inmates in Alaska's prisons will likely double by 2030 unless the state significantly increases its prevention, intervention, education and treatment programs soon…. The study showed that Alaska's prison population is among the fastest growing in the US, with 5 times more inmates in 2007 than in 1981.

It's expensive, too.

ISER's research summary is here. (PDF)