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Romano: Rigged redistricting — it would be funny if it weren't so appalling

 
Published Nov. 25, 2014

Funny story:

So a bunch of voters get together to essentially tell Florida lawmakers that they don't trust them.

Don't trust them to be honest. Don't trust them to be fair. Don't trust them to be, I guess you could say, trustworthy.

These 3 million voters pass two constitutional amendments to make sure voting maps will never, ever be drawn to favor incumbents and political parties.

Hilarious, right?

The Constitution had barely been updated when consultants and operatives began redrawing maps to — you guessed it — favor incumbents and political parties.

We know this because they left a goofy paper trail of emails and maps warning each other not to leave a paper trail of emails and maps.

On the bright side, it turns out our elected leaders are at least a little bit smarter. The actual lawmakers involved — those self-proclaimed champions of transparency — deleted their emails before the court could start looking for smoking guns.

Quite the hoot, huh?

The evidence we did get to see when it leaked over the weekend is what prompted Circuit Judge Terry Lewis to say in July that party leaders had "made a mockery'' of the redistricting process.

In other words, the constitutional amendments had been violated. Not only that, but the violators purposefully used subterfuge and may have lined up unwitting, or unknowing, accomplices to try to avoid detection.

That seems like something the state's attorney general might want to look into. If only her devotion to constitutional amendments wasn't confined to same-sex marriage bans.

So why were people adamant about these amendments in the first place? Well, it seems a bunch of kooky voters were tired of districts being drawn to guarantee outcomes in advance.

Instead of having a ton of districts that purposely skew to upper middle class suburbanites or a handful of districts tilted heavily to minorities, the voters seemed to favor natural geography or city/county lines.

Of course, based on recent election results, I'm thinking lawmakers might need remedial map skills. What happened Nov. 4 was not what the constitutional amendments intended. What happened was the opposite of competition. And democracy.

More than half of the state House and Senate races were runaways. Those politicians were elected either without opposition, or with more than 90 percent of the vote.

Only 4 percent of the races were decided by 5 points or less. Four percent. As in, only 1 out of every 25 races was ever in doubt.

Amusing stuff.

By now, you might be expecting outrage. You might expect the governor, who has gotten excited about random and sporadic cases of voter fraud in the past, to have something meaningful to say about a systematic attempt to rig elections in this state.

You might expect Republicans to be ashamed and chagrined at the antics of some of their leaders. You might expect Democrats to finally stop hiding behind the handful of safe districts they've been handed.

You might expect voters who talk often about American values and freedoms to be screaming about being robbed of their most basic, treasured right.

Maybe it's not such a funny story, after all.