Voters should choose representatives, not the other way around

This month, as many Americans focus on the NFL playoffs and look to the Super Bowl, political players across the country are quietly girding for a rougher, higher-stakes game.

The recent release of the 2010 census results is the official beginning of redistricting season, a political competition that will be played out in 2011 and through the first half of 2012.

Played once every 10 years, the redistricting game is little understood by most Americans. But it has tremendous implications for everyone.

"Winners" will find themselves and their political party set up for long-term contracts to control seats in Congress and state legislatures. In office, they'll be able to do pretty much whatever they please, secure in the knowledge that their districts have been drawn to consolidate their political strength and marginalize their opponents.

The "losers" will see themselves and the Americans they represent roped into congressional and state legislative districts where they'll be cut off from power and left little chance of regaining it.

If your political sympathies lie with the winners, this might sound pretty good. But history teaches us that when one political party is able to rig the game, freeing itself from competitive pressures, elected officials soon lose any sense of accountability to the voters. Complacency -- and worse, scandal -- often follow.

What the redistricting game desperately needs is more referees, arbiters committed to redrawing the nation's political maps in ways that reflect our racial and ethnic diversity and honestly redistribute power based on shifts in population from state to state and from city to suburb to rural area.

Thirteen states have established nonpartisan or bipartisan commissions to take the lead in redistricting. At Common Cause, where I serve as president, we're particularly proud of our support of such panels, which generally are bitterly opposed by political party organizations.

During 2010, we were successful in expanding the authority of the California Citizens Redistricting Commission, a 14-member panel including five Democrats, five Republicans and four independents. In Minneapolis, we backed a referendum in which voters agreed to entrust local redistricting to a nonpartisan Charter Commission; and in Florida we supported a referendum in which voters instructed the state legislature not to draw new districts designed to benefit a particular political party.

We've found that independent redistricting commissions help to foster healthy two-party competition and uphold one of America's fundamental principles: Voters should be represented by people of their own choosing.

Unfortunately, in most states the current redistricting process does exactly the opposite. It puts partisan legislators in charge, allowing them to choose which voters they'll represent.

The census figures tell us -- very, very, roughly -- that America is growing in the South and West and shrinking in the Northeast and the industrial Midwest.

Those numbers generally are good news for Republicans, who've been running well in the growing states. But even where Republicans now dominate, there are pockets of Democratic growth; thousands of those new Texans, for example, are Latinos, an increasingly Democratic constituency.

Those voters deserve representation of their own choosing, as do Republican-leaning voters who happen to live in traditional pockets of Democratic strength in our inner cities and across portions of the farm belt.

But you can pretty much guarantee that in drawing new district lines next year, GOP governors and legislators in at least some of the growth states will overreach, deliberately splitting pockets of Democratic strength.

Similarly, where Democrats hold the governor's office or a majority in the legislature, you can expect to see district lines designed to stifle any GOP growth and protect Democrats.

Both parties, and the American people, deserve better. We deserve a system where voters choose their elected representatives -- and not one where elected representatives choose the voters they want to represent.

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Bob Edgar is president and CEO of Common Cause.

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