Not Quite a Blog

California voters passed Proposition 11 last November, which modified the state constitution and enacted laws to establish a Citizen's Redistricting Commission. As Tony Quinn says in a new article, "Proposition 11---What Will It Do?", from the fledgling California Journal of Politics and Policy:

The 10th time was the charm after all. Passage of Proposition 11 marks the first time California voters have supported redistricting reform. They had defeated various proposals to reform the way we draw district lines nine times over the past 80 years.

The idea embodied by the new regime seems fairly simple, but, like all good ideas, it gets a bit complex when the rubber hits the road:

In essence, three auditors employed by the State that are each registered to different political parties are chosen at random. Meanwhile, any California citizen can submit an application to the State Auditor to serve on the Commission. The three auditors, called the Review Panel, will then whittle down this large pool of applicants into a smaller pool of 60: 20 from the largest political party in California (by registration), 20 from the second largest and 20 from the remaining political parties.¹ Then, the four senior legislators from the State legislature are allowed to strike as many as two names out of each of these three pools. Finally, the state auditor will randomly choose three applicants from the first pool, three from the second and two from the third. These eight Commissioners will, via a complex voting process, elect the remaining six members of the 14-member Commission.

Whew.

It sounds a bit complicated and it is. The Bureau of State Audits (BSA), seeking to implement the Voter's First Act (Prop. 11) in an inclusive and well-informed manner, has asked for input via a number of meetings around the State and via written comments submitted to their team.

When this was first brought to my attention by Kim Alexander, President of the California Voter Foundation, the first thing to catch my eye was the "bootstrapping" use of random selection to eliminate bias from both the Review Panel and the initial eight members of the Commission. (Full disclosure: I sit on Kim's Board of Directors.)

Random selection is a subject dear to my heart. In that vein, I've submitted comments (PDF) to the BSA recommending they use a simple, physical source of randomness---i.e., not a computerized random number generator---and conduct the drawing in public. I pointed out that such public random selection has wide precedent in California government: from the Fair Political Practices Commission's Audit Program, to the California Secretary of State's random selection of ballot ordering to the random selections conducted after each election in California counties to randomly choose the 1% of precincts to manual tally. I also included a set of procedures the BSA could use to conduct a high-integrity lottery-style public random drawing to select the eight initial Commissioners.

I should note that I heed the wisdom of Calandrino et al.'s defense of PRNGs. However, I think this case is distinct in a number of ways: it's orders of magnitude more important of a process and the number of selections to be performed is small.

I look forward to watching how this develops.

¹ I guess if you're not registered to vote, you can't serve?