You Can't Have a Great Election Without Any Races

By any political measure, the 2006 battle for control of the House of Representatives should be a dramatic contest. The majority party, which has been secure in its power for a decade, has been battered by a round of indictments, rising gasoline prices and controversy over the administration's decision to wage war in Iraq. The minority is aggressively recruiting candidates, raising massive amounts of money and launching daily attacks on its adversary.

But no need to hold your breath to find out the outcome of this epic struggle. The reason: The electoral system is rigged.

Not rigged in the old-fashioned, ballot-stuffing sort of way. Rigged in the sense that operatives in both parties have become so adept at drawing congressional districts that most House seats aren't even up for grabs nowadays. Redistricting -- the once-a-decade process in which each state redraws House seats based on the most recent U.S. Census data -- has become more influential in determining congressional races than advertising, political speechifying or grass-roots activism. By segregating voters according to party loyalty, redistricting has insulated incumbents of both parties and dulled competition.

Just last week voters in California and Ohio were given a chance to overhaul their redistricting systems, and in both states they opted not to do it. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, proposed creating a three-member panel of retired judges to revise the congressional map; Ohio Democrats led a campaign to create an independent citizens' commission that would examine maps creating competitive congressional districts submitted by anyone in the state.

Given that House elections, with incumbent reelection rates reaching 98 percent, are starting to take on all the suspense of the contests for the old Soviet Union's central committee, you'd think that Americans would rush to embrace reforms and inject some healthy competition into U.S. politics. But both proposals lost badly on Tuesday. In California, voters rejected the proposition 59 to 41 percent. Ohio's redistricting ballot initiative fared even worse, losing 70 to 30 percent.

"No, we're not going to demand a recount," quipped Keary McCarthy, spokesman for Reform Ohio Now, which backed the idea of an independent redistricting commission.

Two factors doomed the pair of reform initiatives: Most voters seemed to have had a hard time deciding whether redistricting really matters, and those who did, saw it as boosting one party at the other's expense. Thus voters divided along party lines. Californians in counties that favored John Kerry a year ago opposed Proposition 77 by a wide margin of 66 to 34 percent, according to an analysis of voting data by election lawyer Sam Hirsch. In Ohio, counties that backed George W. Bush opposed that state's initiative 76 to 24 percent. "It was partisan and special-interest- driven," says Ohio First spokesman David Hopcraft, whose Republican-affiliated group opposed the state's redistricting measure. "I'm not sure that Ohio voters felt there was a problem."

But there is a problem, and it's threatening to ossify the American political system. In states across the country, the party in power -- often the Republicans, but sometimes the Democrats -- has ensured that it can retain control by creating seats so politically skewed that the opposition doesn't have a shot at unseating the incumbent. This sort of "gerrymandering," a nickname that stems from an egregious bit of line-drawing in the early 1800s that created a district resembling a salamander, has undermined Americans' ability to choose whom they send to Washington.

The result? Stuart Rothenberg, a leading analyst of congressional races, estimates that there are only 25 "truly competitive contests" in the House, out of 435 races. Cook Political Report House editor Amy Walter, another top analyst, puts the number at 28.

In two of the nation's largest states -- California and Illinois -- the two parties joined together at the start of the decade to protect all incumbents in bipartisan gerrymanders. In 2003 then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay secured a rare mid-decade redistricting that cost five Texas House Democrats their jobs. Now those three states combined, which account for nearly a quarter of the entire House, boast only five competitive races in 2006.

If voters aren't pushing for a change in the system, it's hard to expect members of Congress to volunteer to give themselves tougher competition. "You're asking people to give up an enormous amount of power," says Tennessee Rep. John Tanner, a centrist Democrat who is serving his ninth term. "It's going to have to come from the outside."

Tanner, who introduced legislation in May that would require each state to create an independent redistricting commission of at least five members to draw a state's congressional map just once a decade, says the question of redistricting "goes to the very essence of our democracy," because as currently practiced it liberates ideological extremists on both the left and the right from the need to appeal to the political center.