Press Release from the candidate:
Andy Craig, the young Libertarian running a reform-focused campaign for secretary of state, announced on Tuesday that he has joined a growing list of candidates pledged to support nonpartisan redistricting if elected.
Common Cause of Wisconsin, the group promoting the effort, is a nonpartisan watchdog, but most of the signers so far have been Democratic candidates. The presence of Libertarians on the list marks one area where the party of free markets and radically smaller government has found an area of agreement with progressives and left-leaning open government advocates. Craig is the only candidate for the state’s third-highest office, traditionally tasked with overseeing elections, to support the plan.
“As candidates running outside of the two main parties, we understand better than most how badly incumbent politicians can rig the game if they’re allowed to get away with it. The conflict-of-interest in letting partisan officeholders draw district lines is obvious, and needs to stop,” says the 23-year-old resident of Milwaukee. “Like so many corrupt political tactics, Republicans and Democrats can only be counted on to protest when they are in the minority. It’s time to take a principled stand against elections manipulation by both sides.”
In 2012, Republicans retained a majority in both the US House and the state legislature, despite a majority of voters having cast a ballot for their opponents. The packing of liberal voters into a few solidly Democratic districts during the recent redistricting process was widely perceived as the cause of this disparity. In other states the situation is reversed, with Democratic majorities using the redistricting process to preserve their control of legislatures and favor their party’s nominees for Congress.
Gerrymandering- selectively drawing electoral district lines so as to favor one candidate or party- is not new. The term dates to shortly after the American Revolution, taking its name from one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and proposals to defeat the practice are almost as old.
Several states have adopted laws which remove redistricting from the normal legislative process in order to reduce gerrymandering. The Common Cause pledge endorses the Iowa model, under which nonpartisan civil servants present a plan to the legislature for a single up-or-down vote with no amendments. Iowa is widely regarded as having some of the most competitive districts in the nation as a result.
Craig says he would go further than that, however, and hand the task over to a computer program designed to produce the most compact and equal districts possible. Automated redistricting proposals have become more popular in recent years, with the goal of removing political discretion altogether from the question of which voters get to vote for which representatives. He says this would also eliminate the expensive and lengthy court challenges that usually follow any changes to district boundaries.
“One third of voters will get no choice at all for state assembly this year, because only the incumbent will be listed on the ballot. Dozens of representatives will be re-elected by default, thanks to districts carved out to exclusively for ‘red’ or ‘blue’ voters,” insists the Libertarian candidate. “That absurd reality sounds more like elections for the Soviet Politburo than an American state legislature. Wisconsin can do better, and this is a step in that direction.”
More information on Andy Craig for Secretary of State can be found on the campaign’s website, www.andycraig.org, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/AndyCraigWISoS