End Partisan Voting Districts
by Mark W. Bitz

In New York State, the Senate and Assembly leaders draw districts to give a majority of their party members an advantage. They use chair appointments, lulus, member budgets, member items, and party resources to control members and the legislation. They craft legislation to maximize campaign contributions and party resources. They fund community projects in districts with taxpayer money so their supporters appear as heroes in local newspapers. Partisan districts, large campaign war chests, and the favorable public relations trick voters into returning their supporters to office, legislators who toe their line, rubber stamp vested interest legislation, slowly destroy the state’s economy, and cause our children to flee to other states.

The genius of democracy is that all interests are represented and no interest is over represented. A well functioning democracy generates superior solutions. When feedback from all of the citizenry enters the mix, creative synergistic solutions which balance the needs of the individual, community, business, and environment emerge. Everyone wins. In contrast, when trial lawyers, public sector unions, and business groups buy legislation via campaign contributions, the legislation transfers resources from one group to another group. The legislation is neither creative nor synergistic, often distorts free market signals, and generally harms to our economy.

Partisan districts prevent creative synergistic solutions. By destroying the link between legislator performance and their reelection, they cause voters to unwittingly elect incumbents who govern poorly. New York State steadily declines and incumbents enjoy a 99% reelection rate. Partisan voting districts enable incumbents to run without major party opposition in one third of the races and have 20 to 100 times more to spend than their opponents in another third of the races.

Partisan voting districts need to be swept into the ashbin of history. To correct this cooption of our representative democracy and draw non-partisan voting districts, an independent commission of retired judges should oversee the development of a computer algorithm to draw Senate and Assembly districts. The algorithm should maximize the use of county, borough, township, and village lines and minimize the total number of lines to draw each district. At no time should the voter affiliation of the people in a district be considered or enter into the algorithm. Until this egregious corruption of our democracy is corrected we should only vote for Senate Democrats and Assembly Republicans in upcoming elections.

Mark Bitz is President of Plainville Farms and FreeNYS.org. He is author of Creating a Prosperous New York State: Making Elected Officials Accountable for New York State’s Performance Relative to Other States, which is available from Amazon.com. He received his B.S. from Purdue University in Economic Development and M.S. from Cornell University in Public Policy Analysis. He has traveled to 47 states and 36 countries. He taught English in Poland when the Poles stood up to their government and helped unravel the U.S.S.R. He regularly addresses groups, editorial boards, and radio audiences throughout New York State.