RIGGING! (TM) has certainly earned enough spotlight over the last few months, as the Trump campaign initially charged the media with doing precisely this in October when his much-unfortunate statement about grabbing whatevers was made public, then flipped entirely as Democrats screamed bloody murder about the Electoral College, then Trump screamed likewise about “3 million illegals” in California tilting the popular vote.
Likewise, Andrew Clem is an old fixture in the Virginia blogosphere. His essay on how redistricting “rigs” elections is worth a read:
If voter outrage over such electoral outcomes seems a bit muffled (especially compared to Donald Trump’s victory, which — though dismaying — was 100% legitimate), there is a good reason for that: The state legislators want voters to feel helplessly detached from participating in self-government. It’s probably true in many states, but especially so in Virginia, where a privileged political elite has ruled with very little accountability to the voters for most of the commonwealth’s history.
That’s some hot heat, but there’s numbers to back up the concern. Clem’s solutions? Relatively few. One possible solution for redistricting is to have the voters elect representatives that could form a committee to review the process, receive input, have that input reviewed by judges and the committee before being reviewed by the representatives themselves, and then duly passed into law.
…which is how the current redistricting process works today.
Now some solutions have a layer of unelected and “bi-partisan” overseers on such a process — but one can only imagine the concerns there (not to mention, the opportunities for political leanings as well). Not to mention the fact that, once another party is in power, they could do away with the pretense of “bi-partisan” or non-partisan redistricting altogether…
This is part of the reason why OneVirginia2021 sort of leaves the answer blank. But it is worthwhile to draw folks attention to a problem that plagued Virginia in the 1990s when the Democrats lowered the bar and redistricted a rising Republican Party out of power for seven long years… only to have Republicans pay them back in their own coin in 2000. Hence the reason for the long detente when it comes to redistricting reform — certainly the idea of handing the Democrats the gavel only to have them use it as a mallet is out of the question.
A gentleman’s agreement will not be enough. It will have to be process-oriented, and even then, in an post-Obama era where legislation and debate have been replaced by regulations and the courts — who is to say the agreement (or the reform) will be respected by a party whose lifeline is government?